Fantastic Fall Resources You’ll Want in an October Morning Basket

Your October morning basket is the perfect time to include wonderful fall books and nature studies to share with your children.

Fall is my favorite time of year! I love the colors and cooler temperatures. With so much going on, there’s no shortage of ideas for topics to include in your homeschool. A great place for this fun fall-themed learning is your October morning basket.

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Morning baskets are a great way to include all of your kids together for learning. It’s the perfect way to help simplify your homeschool day when you are homeschooling multiple ages.

The best thing about using a morning basket is that you make it your own. You can choose a monthly theme and incorporate it into everything you include in your basket. Or you could use morning time for enrichment work, adding in seasonal nature studies and read alouds.

We do the latter. The materials I include in our morning basket cover art, prayer time, and critical thinking. We also include fun seasonal topics for nature study and read alouds. Continue on to see what’s included in our October morning basket this month to inspire your own fall morning time.

What to Include in an October Morning Basket

As I mentioned, many of the things included in our morning baskets pretty much stay the same each month. This works really well when your kids thrive on consistency, and it makes for easier homeschool planning. However, variety is also fun, so each month we change some of our art projects, nature study topics, and read alouds.

Our morning basket materials are used by kids from 4-years-old to junior high. Much of it includes all of my kids, but some things are just for my older boys. During this time, my youngest may take a break to play for 10-15 minutes, or he may choose to practice writing letters in a notebook.

Prayer time

We begin our morning basket time with prayer. Each morning we pray a decade of the Rosary together that my children take turns leading, even the 4-year-old. October is the month of the Rosary, so this is a perfect month to begin praying it with your kids if you’re Catholic.

Skill-Building Games

We added games this year to our morning basket after taking a brain training masterclass. We’re enjoying the following games this month, but I may change one or two out next month for variety. We play the Disney Eye Found It game more often than the others because my 4-year-old really understands how to play.

Vocabulary

We are starting a new Vocabulary Cartoons book after finally finishing the first one that we started a couple of years ago. We go through one word a day. I show them the cartoon and read the caption to them, and they try to guess the definition. It takes just minutes a day, and the boys have had good retention of the definitions.

Life of Fred

On Mondays, we read aloud one chapter from Life of Fred. It’s a cute, living math book that follows the life of a 5-year-old college professor name Fred. We started it a couple of years ago, and now we’re up to the Farming book in the series.

Art History

A couple of days a week we like to study art history. We really enjoy the Studio membership through Art History Kids. This month, the kids are learning about the artwork of Joan Miro. You can read a review of the program to learn more about it.

Each Monday, I get an email with a link to a pdf full of information about the artist. I love that all the work is done for me. The kids get a chance to do their own artwork in the artist’s style each week using materials easily found around the house. There is so much wonderful information included that I learn along with the kids!

Nature Study

Fall is hands-down my favorite time of year for nature study! I just want to do all things fall. So this month I’m trying to incorporate fall nature learning where I can. Instead of following a theme a week or just one theme for a month, we do several related themes through the whole month. I use the Exploring Nature with Children curriculum for ideas on topics, books, and activities.

Each week, I try to make time for a nature walk or some other kind of outdoor nature time, like the apple picking we did in September. We also try to read a couple of nonfiction picture books throughout the week to learn more about the topics. If we have time, we’ll do an activity or two as well. I’ve found that doing chalk pastel lessons about the topic makes for really easy nature activities. Sometimes the boys will just add what they’ve learned about the topic in their nature journal as their activity. Art and nature go together very well.

I try to keep our nature study pretty simple. When I try to make our lessons complicated and too involved is when I realize we end up not getting to them. So simple is best! There is no shortage of fun fall nature study ideas. Below I share the ones we chose for October.

Our October Nature Study Themes

• Farms/Harvest
• Pumpkins
• Spiders

October Nature Study Activities and Books

Farms/Harvest: For this study, my older boys will create a project. We’ll begin by learning about different types of farms, and then they will choose one they want to learn more about for their project. My preschooler and I will read books about farms and farm animals, plus do some preschool barnyard chalk art lessons.

Pumpkins: We had a pumpkin nature study last October too, but I didn’t get to all of the activities I wanted to do. So we’ll be studying them again in this year’s October morning basket. We’ll be going to a pumpkin patch to pick pumpkins. Then we’ll find out how many seeds are inside one of them. My older boys are interested in learning more cooking skills, so I’ll teach them how to roast pumpkin seeds. Then we have some wonderful fall chalk art lessons that include pumpkins that we’ll do.

Spiders: Since we’re reading Charlotte’s Web as an October read aloud, I figured this would be the perfect time to learn more about spiders. This spider nature study has everything needed to learn all about spiders. We’ve never studied spiders before, so we’ll do as many activities as we can.

October Read Alouds

Charlotte’s Web: We started reading Charlotte’s Web at the end of September just to fill up the rest of the month’s read aloud time. We’re still reading it this month, and it was the inspiration of our farm and spider studies for the month.

Farmer Boy: Once we finish Charlotte’s Web, we’ll move onto Farmer Boy. We’ve read most of the rest of the Little House series, but have never read this one. It’ll fit in with our farm theme nicely.

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Morning baskets are so easy to include in your homeschool day. Especially when you have multiple ages of kids, it’s a great way to teach them all together. October is such an easy month for morning time topics. The wonderful change happening in fall, fall harvests like pumpkins, and even creepy crawlies like spiders make great topics for your October morning basket.