How to Ease Into a Daily Morning Time Routine

Make morning basket a daily habit in your homeschool by creating a morning time routine.

You’ve read everything you can find about morning baskets and why your homeschool should have one.

You’ve bought all the materials to keep in your morning basket.

You’ve bought a basket.

But day after day, the materials just sit there in the super-cute basket you found. Day after day you feel like a failure because you just can’t get to all the wonderful enrichment resources that you want to include in your homeschool day.

What’s the point of having a morning basket if you never find time to get to it?

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You are not a failure! You just need to make your morning basket a habit.

When you make something a habit, it naturally becomes part of your day. It’s no different with your morning basket. But how do you make it a habit? You create a morning time routine for your homeschool. This is the perfect beginning to your homeschool schedule.

This post is the third in a series helping you add a Morning Basket to your homeschool. If you haven’t read the first two yet, you can find them through the links below.

• How to Enrich Your Homeschool Day with Morning Baskets
• How to Create the Perfect Morning Basket

5 Tips to Help You Create a Morning Time Routine.

1. Start small.
2. Build on an anchor.
3. Add what you love.
4. Don’t add too much.
5. Let someone else do the planning.

1. You Need to Start Small.

I know that you are very excited to start all the awesome resources you bought to share truth, beauty and goodness with your children! But if you try to add it all in on day one, I can almost guarantee that you will not be doing it all by day twenty-one.

When you are trying to make something a habit, you want to start small. Decide on one thing that you most want to share with your children and only do that for a couple of weeks. Maybe that is a read aloud chapter each day, a hymn, or an art project. Once you are consistently adding that one thing to your day, then you can add in a couple more. Eventually you’ll be able to work your way up to everything you want to cover in your basket.

2. Build Your Morning Basket On an Anchor.

When your kids were small, you probably set up some kind of bedtime routine, didn’t you? Perhaps it included a small snack, a bath, and a story or two snuggled in bed. Many parenting books advise setting up a bedtime routine with your little ones so that they’ll know what to expect each night at bedtime.

Creating a morning time routine in your homeschool is no different. The easiest way I’ve found to begin a routine for your morning basket is by building it on an anchor of something that you already do every morning. It could begin after breakfast, daily chores, or even a dance party. We do that last one. It’s super-fun and I highly recommend it!

Our Morning Time Anchor

In the past, I’ve had difficulty getting our morning time going each day. My kids do not all wake up at the same time, nor do I force them to, so my early riser would already be working on math by the time my late riser rolled out of bed. Other days I would need to get dinner in the crockpot when we normally started school. A set start time never seemed to work either.

So this year I decided to start our school day with a song. My original plan was to choose a song around 4-5 minutes to begin playing when I was ready to start the day. I figured that amount of time would be enough for the boys to finish what they were doing and make their way to our learning area.

Well, the idea worked so well that now we start our day with a morning dance party! The boys don’t want to miss a minute, so I call them in as I get the song ready. Even my 3-year-old joins in! I play the same song each day, which saves time and gives the kids consistency. It’s easy to be excited about getting the day started when you dance to an upbeat song!

3. Add What You Love to Your Morning Basket.

When there’s something you love, you want it in your day, right? So add in what you love to your morning basket! I love beginning our day with a rosary, so that prayer time is the first thing we do in our morning basket, right after our dance party. I also want to make sure I read aloud to my boys everyday, so we conclude our morning with a chapter of our current book. Make sure that you add in those items that matter most to you and your kids, and you will look forward to morning time everyday!

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.

4. Don’t Add Too Much to Your Morning Basket.

However, don’t go all crazy and add in so much that your basket splits under the weight! Depending on your kids’ ages, you’ll probably want to keep your Morning Basket time to 30-120 minutes. Obviously if all of your children are 5 and under, you’ll want to be closer to that 30 minute mark. High school age kids can handle a couple of hours, especially if some of that time includes longer read alouds.

Maybe you’re thinking, but there’s so much goodness that I want to share with my kids! How can I fit it all in if I limit my morning time? You could use a loop schedule or just save things for another year.

We use a loop schedule for several of our morning basket resources. We rotate through Life of Fred, art history, chalk art, composer studies and poetry one time each throughout the week. We still get to enjoy all of that goodness while keeping our morning time to around 90 minutes a day.

5. Let Someone Else Do the Planning.

Are you stuck on what resources to add to your morning basket? Do you just have too much on your plate right now to research good materials to use? It’s hard to even get to the point of making it a routine when you are stuck in the planning stages. If you’re at that point and think maybe it’s just not for you, then perhaps you should let someone else do the planning for you.

You can find several resources out there for morning time. My favorite is Pam Barnhill’s Morning Time Plans. You can purchase single plans that include several weeks of morning time lessons for a particular theme or time of the year.

Watch My Video for Tips on Making Morning Basket a Habit

To sum up, creating a homeschool morning time routine is the most effective way to ensure the work is done each day. You’ll want to start small with one or two items that are built around an anchor of a meal or song, for example. Make sure you add in items you and your kids love, but don’t add in so much that it becomes a chore. If trying to figure out what to add is causing too much stress, then get pre-made plans. Keep your morning time routine simple and you’ll have a manageable and enjoyable homeschool day.