Create Your April Morning Basket with Amazing Resources

Creating your April morning basket is simple when you include these amazing homeschool materials.

Are you looking for ideas to include in your April morning basket?

You’ll look forward to starting school everyday when you include fantastic materials like these.

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Our morning basket is my absolute favorite part of our homeschool day. I love being able to share these wonderful activities with my kids. I’ve learned so much myself!

Resources to Add to Your April Morning Basket

I created our morning basket with enrichment subjects that my boys could do together. We also add in our group work, like history and science, around our morning basket time, so all of that combined takes most of the morning. Depending on what you include in your morning basket, and the ages of your children, your time might be shorter.

Daily Morning Time Activities

Many activities in our morning basket are done each day. We always begin our school day with prayer time. We continue with the following activities, though not necessarily in this order.

April Read Alouds

Our read aloud time concludes our morning basket each day. At this time, I’ll allow the boys to grab a snack to munch on while I read. When they finish their snack, then they like to color or do other read aloud activities while I finish up the chapter.

We really enjoyed the second book of the Mary Poppins series, Mary Poppins Comes Back as our March read aloud. In April, however, we decided to move onto a different type of book. So we are going to read The Green Ember, the first book in the series of the same name.

April Nature Study

We moved our nature study to morning time a few months ago, and it works great at this time! We usually fit it in right before our read aloud. The nature study activities only take about 10-15 minutes a day.

Sometimes we’ll go outside for a nature walk, while other times I’ll read a nonfiction picture book or two. Occasionally I’ll read a fiction picture book about the topic, and we usually try to get an activity or two in as well. The boys usually write and/or illustrate what they’ve learned in their nature journals as well.

Below are a few great topics for nature study this month. You can find more ideas for spring nature study topics in this post as well.

Frog Nature Study

I originally planned to do our frog nature study in our March morning basket, but we ended up enjoying learning about birds and bird nests so much that I moved the frog study to April. I love having that flexibility with homeschooling! I’m going to plan two weeks for this study because I have quite a few frog books.

So for the frog study, we’ll read some books about frogs. We’ll do a few activities about frogs as well. I also plan to have my older boys draw and label the frog life cycle in their nature journals. We hopefully will also have time to compare and contrast frogs and toads.

Pond Nature Study

I thought a pond nature study would follow a frog study nicely. So we’ll learn about freshwater ponds in April as well. Hopefully we’ll be able to get out and observe a local pond during this study as our nature walk.

Along with observing a local pond, I have a couple of books about ponds I plan to read as well. Then for our activity, I’m planning on having the boys create a pond scene. I think that I’ll first have them sketch the levels of a pond in their nature journals. If we have extra time, I might have them also create one out of cardboard, twigs, and grasses.

Duck Nature Study

I figured after learning about frogs and ponds that ducks would be a perfect study to complete the month. I have a couple of books about ducks to read. I’m hoping maybe we’ll be able to observe ducks during our pond nature walk. If not, we may just sketch or paint ducks in our nature journals, along with noting any facts learned about them.

Geography

For the rest of the school year, we are working on map skills. So each month, I print off a blank copy and labeled copy of our chosen continent for each boy. You can find a map set of all continents here, which also includes a free sampler as well.

Each day they try to write down the countries they’ve studied from memory on the blank continent. They check their work with the labeled map and then study three new countries for the following day. Our April continent will be South America.

Saint of the Day

Most days we read about a saint of the day using these flashcards. If there is a more well-known feast day of a saint in the month, then I’ll tell the boys about that saint’s life instead of a flashcard that day.

Vocabulary Word of the Day

Each day, we use this Vocabulary Cartoons book to learn a vocabulary word of the day. I’m just amazed at how many of these words they’ve remembered since we started the book over a year ago!

Memory Work

For our memory work this year, we’ve focused on Catholic prayers. I wanted to make sure the boys knew them, so I printed off all of the ones I wanted them to know and put them in a binder. They practice saying them for about 5 minutes a day. They are on their last sheet now, so for each week in April, they’ll memorize one set of mysteries of the Rosary.

Weekly Morning Time Activities

Along with the daily work I mentioned above, we also add in one or two additional subjects that we do just once during the week.

Music

For a few years now, we’ve enjoyed SQUILT for music appreciation. Several options are available, such as an online membership class that meets live twice a month and self-guided courses. You can choose to learn by era, composer, and season. SQUILT offers many different topics of study that make music class easy to implement in your homeschool.

Life of Fred

Every Monday, we read a chapter of Life of Fred as a math supplement. This is a living book, which reads as a chapter book, not like a textbook. The series is about the life of a 5-year-old college professor named Fred.

After each chapter, there’s a “Your Turn to Play” section with a few math problems. So the boys and I enjoy a chapter together on the couch, and then they do the math problems in their spiral notebooks before we go over the answers together.

Art History

We’ve loved the new art history curriculum we’ve used the past few months, The Studio membership from Art History Kids. Learn more about it, and other ways to add art into your homeschool and especially your morning basket. You can also enjoy a free sample month to see how great it is yourself.

Additional April Morning Basket Themes

If you’d like to build your morning basket around a theme, here are some themes that work well in April:

• Spring
• Easter
• Rabbits
• Ponds
• Frogs
• Plant Life/Earth Day
• Weather
• Pets (National Pet Day is April 11)
• Poetry
• Shakespeare

Are you new to morning baskets or need some help setting them up? When you join the Homeschooling in Progress email community, you’ll receive homeschooling tips, ideas, and encouragement in your email inbox to help you simplify your homeschool day. PLUS you’ll get a FREE Morning Basket Quick Tips & Monthly Ideas quick start guide to set up your morning basket today.

Preschool Morning Basket

I don’t require my 3-year-old to sit with us during our morning basket. However, there are several things he does enjoy doing with us. He loves to sit with his brothers while we pray the Rosary, and they’ve been a big help on teaching him how and the prayers.

He’s learned so much by sitting in on our nature study time. He still loves talking about clouds and owls almost daily. So I try to find books that are on his level as well, and I’ll read those after our regular morning basket time while the older kids are working on math.

Along with nature study books, I’ve been trying to read additional books and do an activity or two with him based on the book. Many of the books we read are part of the Before Five in a Row curriculum. I love all the activity ideas listed for each book in the guide. It’s so easy to just choose one or two to enjoy together.

He also enjoys participating in chalk pastel video lessons. Recently we started adding Clap for Classics! online music courses into his morning time. He loves listening to the lessons on his headphones while I’m doing group work with the older boys. You can find out more in my Clap for Classics! review.

Learning through play is very important for toddlers and preschoolers. During our morning basket time, he also enjoys these learning activities to keep him busy.

April is a great month to enjoy a morning basket time filled with wonderful resources. The weather is getting nicer and many of us can see the finish line of the school year. Make sure you choose books and other resources that get you excited to begin the day!

Looking for more information on morning baskets? Check out my morning basket series.