YMB #97: Choosing the Best for your Morning Time: A Conversation with Cindy Rollins

Pam: This is Your Morning Basket where we help you bring truth, goodness, and beauty to your homeschool day. Hi everyone. And welcome to episode 97 of the Your Morning Basket podcast. I’m Pam Barnhill, your host, and I’m so happy that you are joining me here today while we have a special guest on today’s episode of the podcast. It is my Morning Time mentor Ms. Cindy Rollins. She is the lady who taught me all about Morning Time, and she is here today to just share some of her wonderful wisdom with all of us. So we get the question a lot. Like I want to just do all of these things in my Morning Time. There’s so many good things to choose from, you know, but I don’t have time. [spp-transcript]

I don’t have time to do everything. Which ones should I put in there? And so Cindy and I are chatting today all about which ones should we be putting in our morning time, or that’s kind of how the conversation started, but it actually took a slightly different turn as we went along. So you’re just going to get to hear Cindy and I just chat about all kinds of things.

We even dive off into talking about reading poetry and so much more, it was a fun conversation. So I think you should just grab a cup of coffee or a cup of tea or a cold drink on a hot summer day and just put your feet up and take part of the conversation just with a group of homeschool moms. And we also talk about Cindy’s new morning time book

that’s out, you’re going to want to check that one out as well. Now, before we get on with the podcast, I just wanted to let you know that we are soon going to be closing the doors on the Your Morning Basket Plus subscription. We are closing the doors on August 10th and they won’t be opening again until early in 2022. And there is a reason why we are doing this.

We are doing this because we are going to be providing extra support and handholding to the moms who are in our membership. As they begin doing Morning Time in the new school year. We really want to make sure that we give lots of extra support and love and help to moms who are getting started with Morning Time for the first time or moms who are looking forward to a done for you Morning Time solution,

and want to know how to use that solution well. So we’re going to be providing all kinds of support and to do that, we needed to close the membership down and have fewer people coming in every day, kind of get a bunch of people in and really be able to lead those moms through the process of having a Morning Time that they will love.

So if you have been interested in the subscription now is the time to go check it out and get inside. You can find out more information about it by going to pambarnhill.com and clicking on the green, get the tools button, and you can find out everything you need to know there. And now on with the podcast.

Pam: Cindy Rawlins is a veteran homeschool mom of nine.

With over 30 years of homeschooling experience, she brought mothers along on her homeschool journey through her blog. She explored Charlotte Mason principles and the practice of Morning Time. Cindy is the author of three books, Mere Motherhood, Morning Time Nursery Rhymes and My Journey Towards Sanctification: A Handbook to Morning Time and Hallelujah: A Journey Through Advent with Handel’s Messiah.

Cindy now inspires mothers sharing practical tips for personal and spiritual growth or her writing speaking, and as the co-host of the Literary Life podcast. Cindy, welcome back to the show.

Cindy: I’m so happy to be here. It’s always fun to talk to you.

Pam: I just love having you on, I think this is like our third or fourth time.

Cindy: Oh yeah,

I have no idea. I just talk and…

Pam: Well, we love it. Well, just in case, this is the first time that someone is, is listening to you on the show. Tell us a little bit about yourself and what your homeschool was like.

Cindy: Well, so I had eight boys and one daughter, so our homeschool was a little bit chaotic. We had all the,

all the things that the boys bring, the silliness and the fun and the goofing off and the physicality. But I started homeschooling when I had read about homeschooling before my children were born. So I was ready to go in 1984 when I had my first baby. And we went onto homeschool from there.

I read Charlotte Mason. I read the book For the Children’s Sake and it really inspired me to start Morning Time. Now she never once mentioned more morning time or even insinuates Morning Time, but that was kind of my way to work of working out the ideas that were in that book that I wanted in my home. And so over the years,

it just grew and expanded. And so our homeschool was really based on Charlotte Mason and Morning Time.

Pam: Oh, I love it. Yeah. And you tell the story and guys I’ll link back to the first time Cindy was on the podcast, which was episode one.

Cindy: Wow.

Pam: So many episodes ago. And we’re getting really close to episode 100 now,

but you tell the story about you were going to buy a high chair and you went to the thrift store and spent your money. Like you found it cheaper, and then you spent the extra money on books or something like that. And that was where you picked up For the Children’s Sake.

Cindy: That is right.

I had to go then and buy the high chair at Goodwill instead of, you know, JC penny or something. Pam: I love it. I love that you were so thrifty and now, now I can spend the extra money on books. So it’s perfect. Well, I know that morning time looked really different in your home through the years,

but just as a generality, could you kind of tell us what was Morning Time like in the Rollins household? I mean, did it happen first thing, did it happen second thing? Was everybody really there, even when you had teenagers? Just give us kind of a brief overview?

Cindy: Well, in a way it really looked the same from the beginning to the end,

and within that framework, it changed around a lot. And I learned a lot as I went along it, when we first started it expanded more than anything else over the years, as I saw well, this would work in Morning Time and, you know, I’d be struggling to fit something in our school.

And then I’d think, oh, I could do a couple of minutes of this in Morning Time. And so each day we would just start off, the kids had their chores. We had breakfast, they had some Bible reading on their own, and then my kids would start math and they would just start math until I pulled myself together to say,

it’s time for Morning Time. And then they would put their math aside and finish it after Morning Time. And then from there, Morning Time was, you know, Bible, hymns, poetry, on and on and on all the way down to, you know, memory work of different sorts, and then reading aloud from a couple of different books.

Pam: Okay. So a big variety of things. And you’re beginning to hint at kind of what I’m having you on to talk about. So one of the big thing we wanted Cindy to talk about today is this question that we get so often where moms are saying, we want to put so much stuff. There’s so much stuff we want to put in our Morning Time.

I don’t know how to choose the best things, how do I know what to include when my Morning Time could honestly have 50 things in it? And so you’re saying your Morning Time got longer and longer to accommodate more things.

Cindy: It did. And I would say that the point of no return, I would say at the peak of my homeschool, when everything was clicking with the right age group, and I wasn’t worried about this age group and that age group, we had about two hours of morning time, but we read aloud a lot and the kids loved that part. So I always say sometimes it went to two hours because they were saying reading another chapter of Tom Sawyer,

and, you know, I’d do that. So, and I think after that, it begins to kind of wear on everybody. It’s time to get up and move and do something else. Although I let my kids move around in Morning Time. Nobody had to sit there with their hands in their lap the whole Morning Time, that I think that would have been impossible.

We did various things. And this is one of the things you can do when you want to add more to Morning Time, you can kind of double up, you can draw during Morning Time, or you can have a read-a-loud notebook during Morning Time, or, or I even did nature study notebook during Morning Time that isn’t strictly,

I guess I can drive the Charlotte Mason purists mad, but it isn’t strictly what Charlotte Mason said about nature notebook, but it worked well in our family. And we actually have nature notebooks instead of just the idea of nature notebooks.

Pam: Yeah. And so, just to like you, what you would do is you would put the field guides on the table and then have the kids look at the pictures in the field guides,

and then draw all those things into their nature notebooks while you were reading aloud to them at Morning Time. That’s right. And sometimes they could go out and find something. If we, if we needed a little break we’d, I’d say go find something for your nature notebook. And then I would read aloud where they drew it in their nature notebook. I did that mostly with books

I knew they loved. So there wasn’t the temptation to not pay attention, but they played with Lego’s during Morning Time or blocks different things like that. And things don’t have to be long and Morning Time. You can add a lot if you just keep it super short, like two minutes, three minutes, like we did grammar in less than five minutes a day in Morning Time,

you know, you don’t want to be labor, everything you don’t want to yak away. You want to read the Bible. You don’t have to waste waste a lot of time expounding on your thoughts on the Bible, or because you’re wanting to do this every day and you don’t want your kids to get tired of hearing your exposition. So it helps if you just read the Bible and move to the next thing and read the poem and move to the next thing,

you don’t have to go into these long explanations where mom is constantly interacting with the material. The thing is, mom is doing that because she’s making with the material she’s learning. But if that, we also want our kids to be doing that in their heads. So we don’t have to necessarily do that for them.

Pam: Okay. So can we ask them though?

I mean, would you ask? Like, you know, so you read a poem and, you know, so here’s how it would go down at my house. I would read a poem and then I would say, you know what, I really love this word here, or this line here. And I might repeat the line a couple of times and say,

I just love the way that the words roll off my tongue. And then I might ask them, what was your favorite part? But still we’re talking about something that takes like three minutes to do.

Cindy: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s a time, even in Bible reading for Mom occasionally to say, wow, that really hit me because… and just share her heart as a fellow Christian with her children.

But I also think it, yeah. And in poetry you can, I think people need to understand. There’s a lot of ways you can approach poetry and even a lot of ways that you can approach it in Morning Time. Sometimes you just read the poem and then sometimes you read it day after, day after day. And then you start asking some questions,

you know, you might have a poem that you’re just, you might have a book. You’re just going through the poetry. You can just read it. You don’t have to even say anything, let their minds work on it. Or you might have a poem that you’re reading every day. Cause you’re trying to memorize it. And about two weeks in,

you know, you can start asking the kids questions about that poem. Like, you said what line really struck you? Or what do you think about this poem? Or what is this poem saying? Those are things that when you’re with a poem, a lot, those kinds of things begin to really come alive

and the kids have something to say, what you don’t want to do is try to pull something out of the kids about the poem that isn’t actually there, or that they feel pressure to impress mom or impress everybody in there. And, you know, they’re digging around in their heart or, you know, that’s really not the point of it.

The other thing you can do with a poem that I think is great in Morning Time that’s more of a skill. You can, you can figure out the rhyme scheme of the poem. Like, is it a, B, a, B, or, you know, a BBA and go and talk about that a little bit, but all of that,

like you said, it doesn’t have to last a long time and better if it doesn’t.

Pam: Right. Right. Yeah. I find that my kids, like if I’m, I don’t know, just doing it kind of in a low pressure way. And if I’m just throwing the question out there in general so if we’re talking about,

you know, metaphors or something, and so my kids are familiar with the concept of a metaphor, they know what a metaphor is. We’ve talked about it a lot in the past and things like that. And I’m like, you know, so can we, you know, can we find some metaphors in here? Where is this poet comparing two things?

And if I just throw the question out there at large, then somebody’s going to step up. You know, whereas if I point to one certain kid and say, okay, you tell me where the,

Cindy: The deer In the headlights goes on. Yeah.

Pam: That’s where I, I think Morning Time is actually great for something like that, because you can just kind of open it up to everybody.

And if that kid, like, if they’re sitting there going well, geez. I can’t think of where the metaphors are right now. Some sibling is going to pipe up with it and they’re still going to learn. They’re still going to be like, oh yeah, I could see that. That is kind of cool. And they might name the next one.

But that’s one of the things I love about Morning Time is it really does take some of the pressure off.

Cindy: Really narration the way Charlotte Mason did it, and that is a type of narration, is really fun in a group of people because they do feed off of each other. If someone

says something kind of weak on their narration, they don’t need mom to say, well, that was really weak because their sibling goes, oh, I know, let me tell what happened in the chapter. And or that you can go, well, now you stop and you finish what happens so that they each get a chance. And

it’s more lively because there’s more minds that work on it. So what you said about metaphor, kids who grow up with this kind of language presented to them in a natural way, like we’re talking about a very organic way, a metaphor is a part of their lives. And so when you get around to telling them what a metaphor is,

it’s already embedded in them as an organic way without the name. And when you tell them the name, they understand it. That is the beauty of this kind of learning, because we often think we want to teach our children skills, but we don’t, they don’t have anything to bring to those skills. And so they fumble around and their skills are poor.

They have poor skills, but if you have this history of language, and then you are going to learn a skill, then they have something they’re bringing to that. And it becomes very possible to teach things that would have seemed harder under other circumstances when their minds are empty and they have nothing to bring.

Pam: Yeah. Yeah. If you have a child who’s been just read poetry for years and years and years,

when you sit down to talk about metaphor. And I think of the poor kids who get like this worksheet and the sixth grade go and pick out all the metaphors, you know? And they’re like, if they have no frame of reference for metaphors, that’s incredibly difficult, but you know, if they’ve been immersed in language and poetry for years and years,

then when you introduce the concept of metaphors, that they can start seeing those connections, you know,

Cindy: And it’s not tedious, it’s not boring. And they really take to it and it doesn’t kill the idea of metaphor, make it just something on a worksheet, it places it, where it should be in living language.

Pam: Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

So let’s go back to the topic cause you and I, I mean, we could just talk all day, so there are a lot of good things to include in Morning Time. And Cindy is saying let’s include more good things in the Morning Time by making them short, you know, they don’t have to take up a lot of time and it’s okay to make your Morning Time longer to include these good things.

Is that what I hear you saying?

Cindy: Yeah. Because I’ll tell you what, when you get to the end of your schooling the school years, as I have, you’re never going to look back and say, I promise this. I absolutely guarantee this. You’re never going to say, man, we spent way too much time in Morning Time. You’re just never going to say that that is going to be the highlight and the memory and what you take that the kids take away from it.

Yeah. You might’ve done some other things better. Some science better, some math better. You know, I always say, I wish I had given my children a love for math because it’s taken me so long to get a love for math. But so it’s not to say that everything will be perfect, but I really don’t think you can regret the time that you spend in Morning Time.

I at least I have never met anybody who, who did or does.

Pam: Right. Well, okay. So, but what, and you know, it’s fine for us to say that now, just like, it’s so easy for me to look back now and say to moms of preschoolers, like, don’t do anything, just live your life and read them lots of books,

but you know when you’re in the heat of this and you have, and I’m just going to use my kids as an example, when you have a 16 year old and you have a 14 year old and you have an 11 year old, and everybody has a million things that they’re doing in the afternoon, and it feels like you’ve got all of these things that you have to get done and put on a transcript.

And I just, like, I only have an hour for morning time. That is all I have.

Cindy: Right.

Pam: How do you, how do you make that mom feel better about that?

Cindy: Well, I think what you do is if you have a child who really does have a lot, like a 16 year old, who has a lot of other work,

you don’t belabor, Morning Time with them. You do whatever would contribute to what they’re already doing. If you’re reading Shakespeare, then they need to hear that because that’s very much a part of their preparation for life. So, so you would do that first. So you might read a little bit of the Bible and hold off on your Bible memory with the other kids so that you can read Shakespeare with your older child.

You might, you might sing as a family, read a Bible verse and then let the high schooler go. You don’t have to hold onto your children. As a matter of fact, it’s really good for your children to see you willing to let them go. Now, in your heart you’re not really willing to let them go, you’ve got their ankles as hard as you’re holding on as hard as you can,

but they’re going to grow up. And when they see mom, let them go a little bit. I think it, it lets them take a deep breath and cooperate with what else she has going. So you don’t have to hold a high schooler in Morning Time. Sometimes you can for various and sundry reasons. A lot of times there’ll be nearby and you’ll hear them.

Oh, you’re reading that. I love that book. And you know, that they’ll remember things and really perk up, oh, I memorized that poem or something like that. So you can let those high schoolers go. You can, I always gear morning time generally to the oldest child in the room. And so that way your little, your little guys are always going to be able to get something out of that.

But if you’re just only doing it for the little ones, then you’re, you’re boring your older children. So you kind of tend to gear it towards the oldest child in the room. And then if that, you know, that’s too old, then you, you can let that child go and move down the line to the next in line.

Pam: Well, you’ve alluded to the fact that you did things like grammar in Morning Time, and we’ve talked about that a lot, but are there things that you can put in Morning Time for your older kids that you can count like on a transcript?

Cindy: Oh, absolutely. I gave my kids, at the end of their high school years, they got a fine arts credit for our work and morning time. And I put everything, we did composer study. I kept, you know, they stuck around for that composer study, artist study. And it, and this, these things do not have to be,

Pam: Doesn’t it have to be a year of one thing.

Cindy: No, it doesn’t have to even be in depth that you,

if you, if you’re studying say, Vermeer, you can look at the paintings by Vermeer. You really don’t have to know everything about Vermeer and his background and a story book about him. There’s also just, oh, this is Vermeer. Isn’t this a lovely picture. What do you see in it? You can take a minute or two where they look at the picture,

then they turn it over. You say, what do you remember? And that can be it. You don’t have to have these extended deep studies of these things, but, but over four years of listening to classical music, looking at various paintings by various artists, talking about these things, as you walk along the way that definitely can be for a high school student,

a credit in fine arts. And, you know, I mean, Shakespeare is literature, English, grammar, even, even grammar. If you, if you’re going to diagram a sentence, it doesn’t hurt to have the high school student there. Anything that, you know, as an adult helps you is going to be something that the high school student can also,

you know, can transfer to the transcript a little bit. But then sometimes they do have a lot of overwhelming work to do for the transcript. And, and you can, you got to kind of gauge that.

Pam: Yeah. Yeah. So it sounds to me like, I’m going to ask you this next question, but I think it’s kind of moot.

So the question originally was, how do you make sure Morning Time doesn’t take the entire school day, but it, it sounds like it would be okay if it did.

Cindy: In a way I do. I think that, you know, here’s our school a school day for our family consisted of Morning Time, math, written narration, and reading lists.

Sometimes they had some skill work they had to do. Like I had to work after Morning Time, I’d work with kids who needed to have phonics. That kind of thing has to be squeezed in there, but, and there might be other skills like that, 30 minutes of Latin or one of those things. But to me, if I’m going to check it off as a school day,

we’re going to have Morning Time. We’re going to have math and we’re going to have a written narration and we’re going to, and the kids are going to read from a list. And that would be a really full, nice school day that would accomplish a lot. Now I considered science part of Morning Time, because we would read aloud books that were,

you know, in that genre of science. And that would be their science. I use the Ambleside lists, but then when they get to high school and you know, you do have to let them go. You don’t want them sitting around reading, Madam How and Lady Why, while, you know, they should be doing biology.

Pam: Okay. That was my question is what do you do when you have a high school or are they still participating? So it sounds like that up through middle school science was in Morning Time, but then you, the high schoolers were actually doing your more traditional science courses. Right?

Cindy: Absolutely. That’s how we did it.

Pam: How did you decide,

like what subjects were best suited for morning time, and then what subjects were best suited to go somewhere else in the homeschool day? Because there are a lot of moms who would take grammar and say, well, there’s no way I can do this with nine kids who range in age from two to 18.

Cindy: Well, for one thing that the question is what are they going to do and what kind of a return are you going to get on this? So are you going to give them a grammar program, have them work on grammar all year, and then at the end of the year, when you ask him them, what is an adverb? They say something like, oh, I know, I know, I know this,

I know it. What is an adverb mom? I don’t remember. That’s, that’s what a grammar program often does. And even when they’re doing those fancy, cute grammar programs, where they sing all the songs and they know everything, they still don’t have the interaction with language. They basically just have a list of memorize terms, which they’re not that great at applying.

So for you to move grammar to Morning Time and say, I’m going to spend five minutes a day, examining an English sentence, either diagramming it, or, you know, using another form. I like the Michael Clay Thompson practice books. I would just buy the teacher’s edition. And I would put the sentence in the teacher’s edition on the board.

And then I have the teacher’s edition. So, you know, we could check if we were right about everything, but I didn’t buy the workbooks for everybody. And, you know, it was very expensive. So I just use the teacher’s edition and did these sentences. And you get to know the English sentence very well by doing this, one thing I think helps is if you’re consistent,

you can do something a little bit each day, but you kind of need to do it consistently for it to add up to something.

Pam: Yeah. Yeah. Because we, and we did this, so Cindy taught me how to do this with the Michael Clay Thompson books. And so I did that for level sentence analysis for a couple of years in Morning Time.

And if we went too long in between analyzing a few of those sentences, then the information would kind of fall away a little bit and we wouldn’t see good results. But if we were consistently talking about those sentences every day, it really did. It only took three or four minutes. And, you know, they were interacting with the language and such great vocabulary in there as well.

Cindy: Well, grammar is an abstract subject and it’s much more important for a child to be familiar with language, hear language and use it well than actually know why he’s using it well, or that the verb did this. And then noun did this. Those are great things, but you actually can go to college and continue to write well, without knowing all of that stuff.

I mean, you should know it exists, but if, if you’re reading a lot and you’re using language a lot, then that that’s a side issue. It’s fun, and it’s good to know, but it’s not going to hinder you from being a good writer. I mean, you might not make it to a copy editor status,

but you can write.

Pam: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Well, okay. So if you only had 30 minutes, if Cindy Rollins only had 30 minutes to do Morning Time in her homeschool, what would you make a priority?

Cindy: Boy, That’s a hard question. Well, you know, Jesus is the answer, right? Of course I would read the Bible a little bit.

The one thing that I would make a priority. And, and, and I’ve, this has just hit home to me this year, how important it is. And I’m not a good singer. I sing terribly. Some of my kids sing very well. Some don’t sing so well, but I don’t think there is anything more important than Morning Time than singing as a family together. There’s just something about it. Number one, it’s healthy. It, it activates that. What is that, that Vegas nerve in our bodies, it produces just, it helps us to breathe. I said, in the age of COVID, we all need to be singing. It’s like going out and jogging around the block.

We just need to have this cultural sharing of music. And there’s something in that that if we don’t do it in Morning Time, when else are we going to sing? And I think as human beings, we all need to be singing every single day. There’s just something there about that. So I would not skip singing even though singing is the easiest thing to skip.

I would not skip poetry. I think that there Northrop Frye, if you know, I know you you’ve had Angelina Stanford on before she loves Northrop Frye, but I just read a great quote by him where he said, all children should start with nursery rhymes and poetry. That is the beginning of language. Well, to tell the truth, it is not only the beginning of language,

it’s the most sophisticated language that we have. And when you give your children a foundation of poetry, you are preparing them for life and almost any kind of language that they’re going to come up against. So poetry, many people in our day and age don’t like poetry. They don’t want to do it because they think I don’t like it.

I would say, you know, try to overcome yourself and read poems. And I would say, don’t analyze them, just start reading them. Don’t worry about if you don’t understand them, just start getting that language in your heart because you’ll go to bed at night and you’ll have read a poem and all of a sudden you’ll wake up and you’ll go,

oh, I get what that line means. Your brain will be working on that. And it’s so I wouldn’t skip poetry. So I would say you would do Bible. You would do some singing, you would do poetry. And then probably I would say read aloud, pick a really good book and read aloud to your family. So you can build that family culture of a shared,

shared story that when they grow up, they can, you know, they can say, oh, he’s so he’s so much like, Eor, and you know, your whole family is like, oh, oh yeah, he’s Eor, he’s he, or he’s he, that he’s Eustas Scrub, you know, a boy who almost deserved that name and you have a family culture that is built through reading aloud.

Pam: Yeah. You know, with all that, the things that you can put in the Morning Time, and you could put so much in there, you can do so many different things in there. And honestly, there are some things that are not on your list right there that my kids absolutely love to do in Morning Time. But just to hear that simple list right there,

it’s so doable and it really gets to the heart of a lot of what a Morning Time is about, you know, interacting with language in a myriad of ways that are just going to make you a stronger reader and writer, you know, building up your, your own personal relationship with God, through reading the Bible and studying that. And then, and I used the term study very loosely there,

right. Reading and listening and, and then, you know, interacting with those really good books and things. And so I love that. It’s very simple, but it so much would be packed into that 30 minutes every single day. Yeah. Since you know, I I’ve asked people recently, well, what have you added to Morning Time? So many people have things I never even dreamed of adding.

I didn’t get around to, but I know people will do like the joke of the day that I know people who start morning time with the joke of the day. And I thought, well, that is really great. You come and you immediately start off with something that brings a smile to your face, but there are me, like you said, you could just go on and on and on with,

you know, the joke of the day, the missionary of the day, the, this of the day. And it there’s really no end to what you can do in Morning Time as we are for years, we had to do mad libs every day just because, you know, that was how I got that nine-year-old buy-in yes. And finally,

now I just quietly let them go away. And he doesn’t ask for them every day anymore. So it’s awesome, but yeah. Well, what are some of your favorite resources to gather for inspiration for Morning Time? You’ve mentioned poetry a number of times, and I know that’s something that particularly intimidates people. So do you have a favorite poetry resource or another resource?

Cindy: Well, there are some good poetry resources out there. William Harman has the hundred, oh man. It’s, it’s something hundred poems. I didn’t come prepared to talk about this. There is a great poetry resource called something else, but really honestly, just getting in there. Well, Thomas Banks has a beautiful podcast called The Well Read Home,

and that is a fantastic resource because he does a little tiny bit of analysis, but he doesn’t carry it too far. And he reads the poems beautifully. Any nursery rhyme book is great for poetry. There are, I, you know, there are lots of compilations of poems just to have a basic poem book in your house that you can read through my I’m.

I know you said we talk about this at the end, but my new, so I used to have, what’s called the Morning Time handbook. We’re about to release the it’s going to be called Morning Time: A Liturgy of Love. And we have all the poems in the book so that you don’t have to go look for them. So that’s going to be a much more expanded.

It’s going to be easy to find poems to memorize and read. It’ll be right at your fingertips in that book when it releases. And it’s probably released already at, at this point. So that is a book that will be a good resource for all, for all of Morning Time. I think life is the best thing. Like when you go to church,

you sing a song, you love it. You put it in Morning Time. I think it’s fantastic when people use what is going on in their church, the songs they’re singing to, to learn at home. I think that is a great way to make Morning Time relevant and to keep it and, and the nature of your family, when you read book lists and you come up with things,

you know, I partly, the reason I did read alouds in Morning Time was there were books I wanted to read. So I picked what I wanted to read and here that was also something that children would enjoy. And that I got through a lot of great books that way, when, at a time when, you know, I wasn’t going to be reading in,

otherwise that was it for me during some of those years.

Pam: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, we tell moms this all the time, that like Morning Time counts. So the time that you spend reading the Bible and Morning Time, the time that you spend praying in Morning Time, the time you spend reading to your children in Morning Time, it all counts for you.

So if you’re not finding other times during the day to have a quiet time for yourself, the stuff you’re doing in Morning Time totally counts. So well, Cindy, tell me a little more about that book of yours. That’s coming out it’s Morning Time: A Liturgy of Love. And tell me, you mentioned the poems in there. What else is going to be in there for us moms?

Cindy: Okay. So it is going to have basically the lots of memory work. Like I can have the geography questions that I used with my kids in the Morning Time will be in there. Hymns, lyrics. Some of the lyrics will be in their folk songs. We’ll have a list of folk songs, a long list, an annotated list of read alouds that we’d enjoyed in our family will be in there.

And it goes through Morning Time, kind of as a real on a real basic here is what Morning Time is. And then it expands from there to go through each of the, you know, Plutarchs, I have a chapter on Plutarch, have a chapter on Shakespeare. I have chapters on singing and Morning Time and, and all the different manifestations of that.

And, and it’s going to be really a special book. I’m very excited about it because it’s just, it’s something I would have enjoyed having it brings it all together in one place. And I, I think it’s going to make it very easy for moms to, to get a feel for it. And, you know, I think there’s other places that can become places where people have Morning Time.

Sunday schools are one area where I think Morning Time, I think Sunday schools would be great if they were just a Morning Time session and, you know, and, and even care homes right now. You know, if people could go in, I’m actually going to try and see if I can pull this off, but I’d like to do that at my mom where my mom is at assisted living,

go in and have Morning Time with those people because they do have songs and poems in their heart that you can bring back to their remembrance. I think a Morning Time movement of taking Morning Time into nursing home facilities would be one of the best gifts, you know, to offer to society and to elderly people.

Pam: And yeah, it really is because it,

it really is for all ages. And I know you, you still continue to do Morning Time, even though it’s much, much smaller or now?

Cindy: Yes, I have to. I just did. I just couldn’t quit. So I just kept right On.

Pam: Oh, I love it. Well, Cindy, what date does the book come out?

Cindy: Well,

it’ll be the end of June that it comes out, hopefully. So I don’t know when this airs, but if it’s past June and you haven’t seen it then, Okay. So this one airs July 27th. So you guys should be hearing it on July 27th or after. So that means the book is already out and you’re going to want to go and find that Amazon your website.

Yes. You can find it on Amazon. I do have a website a morning time for moms.com and we’ll have links to it. But for the most part, it’ll be available on Amazon, maybe Barnes and noble. I’m not sure where the publisher will have it, but I do know it will be on Amazon. And we’re going to include a couple of links to that one in the show notes for you guys.

So you can be sure to pick up this fabulous morning time resource. Well, Cindy, thank you so much for coming on and joining me today. I really appreciate it. Well, thank you. It was a lot of fun. And there you have it. Now, if you would like links to any of the books or resources that Cindy and I chatted about today,

including Cindy’s new morning time book, you can find those by going to the show notes for this episode of the podcast. Those are@pambarnhill.com forward slash Y M B 97. And while you’re on the website, be sure to check the done for you your morning basket plus membership, where we have live events and done for you. Morning time plans to help you make mourning time and reality in your homeschool.

Now I will be back again in a couple of weeks with a really fun interview with Lotus Stuart, from art history, kids, Lotus has a unique approach to teaching your kids about art history and doing art with your kids that any mom can do. And I think you’re really going to love that podcast. So be sure to come back in a couple of weeks and check that one out until then keep seeking truth,

goodness and beauty in your homeschool day.