Our Morning Routine

We've been trying a new routine every morning for a few weeks now.  Until this we did not have routine, the kids and I walked into the School room and well, just started on with work.  I thought it would be nice to have a morning routine to change things up and plus get in some daily practice and inspiration for the rest of the day.

Sorry for the bad shot, this board is against a window!

I have this big non-magnetic white board in the school room that we never used.   After changing the date on our calendar every morning, D writes the date in two formats on the board.  Under that, I write a saying or a proverb and we talk about it.  Under that is a sentence for D to proof read.  You can read more about these ideas here at Montessori for Everyone.

After D's corrections!

Another thing I wanted to do was to start reading the enormous collection of books that we have.  We have a ton of books and many favorites get read again and again, but a few good ones are ignored.  So I wanted to make it a habit to start reading intentionally these ignored books.  We started of by reading a book of heroes.

This is a very nice book with short stories on various historical figures as well as common heroes.  We read one story a week and discuss it.  The kids love the stories and we re-read some many times!

We also own quite a few poetry books.  We've been reading from this one now.  We often end up reading more than a couple every morning!

One good thing about this intentional reading is that it has opened up a lot of interesting discussions.  I've also introduced the dictionary since we've encountered some new words while reading poems.  We own a couple, but this one is D's favorite.  I could not find an amazon link for this one.  Most of our books, dictionaries or encyclopedias were bought in our local library's used book sale.

D reading a poem

She looked up the meaning of "stile" by herself!

D has added a "Spelling Test" to our morning routine!  Completely her idea.  She read in one of her books about it and wanted to do it.  It always starts with 5 words but ends up filling the whole white board!  She dictates her own word and spells it.  I only check it for her!

There you have it.  We are loving our new routine.  To this currently we are also adding reading about some of the books related to the Third Great Lesson which inspires a lot of work.  Presently we have a crush on Simple Machines and mommy is trying to put together a learning unit now!