Here Are the Best Resources to Add to Your May Morning Basket

Find the best resources for your May morning basket to finish your homeschool year strong!

Are you wrapping up your homeschool year this month? Would you like to have some fun activities to finish the month strong?

If so, you’ll want to continue below to find out what wonderful resources you should add to your morning basket in May!

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Our homeschool morning basket is our favorite time of the school day. So even though we’ll be finishing up our school year in mid-May, I plan to continue our May morning basket all month.

I’m also going to try something a little different for morning time this month. In April, when we read The Green Ember (which is a MUST read!), I used these morning time plans with the book. We really enjoyed having everything tied together, so I’m going to try to recreate the idea a little myself this month.

Great Resources for a May Morning Basket

Morning Basket Activities We Do Daily

Some of our morning basket contains work we do each day, while the rest is done maybe once or twice a week.

May Read Alouds

We always end our morning time with a read aloud. This time usually falls around mid-morning, so I let my boys grab a snack before we read. Giving your kids activities to do while you read is a great way to help them stay focused on the story.

I might be overly ambitious this month, but I’m planning on 3 books. The main book, and first that we’ll read, is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I’d like to also try to fit Peter Pan in, although we may just watch the movie. Then I’ll close out the month with Who Was Walt Disney. You’ll see below why I chose these particular books.

May Nature Study

Now, we don’t always get to nature study every single day. But I put it here because we usually do fit it in pretty close to daily.

Nature study usually includes a nature walk, a couple of nonfiction books about our topic, and a couple of activities related to our topic throughout the week. We spend about 15-20 minutes a day on these.

For most of the school year, I’ve tried to have one nature topic each week, loosely following this curriculum. But on weeks we had a lot going on, that meant that I didn’t get to some topics at all. So this month I chose a couple of different topics that I can extend throughout the month if we have time. Or just do in 5 days or so if we are too busy.

Plant Life/Wildflowers Nature Study

We’ll start out May by learning about plant life. I’m specifically going to look at smaller plants and flowers. I’m planning to do a large garden unit study with the boys this summer, so I thought this would be a nice lead-in. We’ve never really learned much about wildflowers, so I plan to have an emphasis on those, too.

If you’d like to use a ready-made nature study, check out this wildflower nature study.

Caterpillars Nature Study

After our plant study, we’ll move onto caterpillars. Hopefully we can find some on a nature walk around our yard. We have lots of butterflies around each year, so I’m hoping we’ll be able to.

Another reason for choosing to study caterpillars has to do with our read aloud. I’m planning a small unit study that will tie in our read alouds with art history and nature study. Caterpillars tie into Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Vocab Word of the Day

The Vocabulary Cartoons book we’ve been using for over a year will continue this month as well. I’ve been so impressed with how many words the boys have retained.

Weekly Morning Time Activities

The following activities we do either just once a week or several days of the week.

Music

We enjoy lessons from SQUILT as our music class. There are many other options for music with SQUILT, including learning about instruments or composers and specific musical periods.

My preschooler also enjoys wonderful online music classes from Clap for Classics! He especially enjoys the live class on Tuesday mornings that are available with the monthly subscription. If you want a risk-free trial to see how great the courses are for yourself, you can sign up for their free Bumblebees, Birds and Beethoven mini course.

Life of Fred

Life of Fred is a living math book that is thoroughly enjoyed in our house, even by my son who is not a huge math fan. We use this book as a supplement to our regular math curriculum and read one chapter a week.

Art History

We have loved being members of The Studio from Art History Kids. Everything I need to teach my kids art is emailed right to me each week. I know exactly what to say & what activities to have the kids do. My boys have really enjoyed having Lotus, the creator of the program, read books about the artist each month, too. It’s the perfect resource to add art to your homeschool.

During May, we are going to cover the works of Mary Blair. We had planned to do this in March. However, with all the craziness that happened that month, we didn’t get to all of it. So I decided to do a big unit on the work of Mary Blair this month instead. A bonus with an Art History Kids membership is access to one free archived month each month. So even though Mary Blair isn’t a current study this month, we can still enjoy it.

She worked for Walt Disney for many years, creating art for movies like Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. This is why I chose those books for our read alouds and caterpillars for nature study. This printable will extend learning on the Who Was Walt Disney book. I also plan to have the boys watch those movies to see her work applied to film. I think this will be a really fun way to end our school year!

See How to Combine Literature, Art History and Nature Study

May Morning Basket Themes

If you’d prefer to work your morning basket around a particular theme, May is a wonderful month for any of these.

• Star Wars (May 4) SQUILT has a great post on learning about John Williams’ music.
• Plants/Flowers
• Cinco de Mayo/Mexico
• Gardening
• Insects
• Mothers/Mother’s Day
• Mary, Mother of Jesus

Just Getting Started with Morning Baskets?

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The month of May is the end of the school year for many homeschool families. However, that doesn’t mean it needs to be boring! Create an amazing end of your homeschool year with fun unit studies, combining read alouds, nature study, and art history. Add fun enrichment like music and math living books and you’ve got a recipe for a wonderful homeschool morning basket to finish your school year strong.

What’s in your May morning basket? Please comment below!