YMB #38 Morning Time with Middle Grades: A Conversation with Kim Devers

This is your morning basket, where we help you bring truth, goodness, and beauty to your homeschool day. Hi everyone. And welcome to episode 38 of the, your morning basket podcast. I’m Pam Barnhill, your host, and I’m so happy that you are joining me here today. Well, one of the questions we often get at your morning basket is what does morning time look like with older kids?

So often we get the picture in our head of kind of a circle time situation, where we have a lot of little kids around us, but can morning time actually transfer to kids who are out of the elementary school years, and you know what it can today’s guest is Kim Deavers. And this mom of many is now doing morning time with only two kids.

And both of them are middle school age. And so she’s come on the podcast today to talk to us about what that looks like in her home and how morning time has changed some over the years, it was a fun conversation. And I think you’re going to enjoy it. We’ll get on with it right after this word from our sponsor. This episode of the podcast is brought to you by mere motherhood.com.

It was back in the 1980s when Cindy Rollins, then a new mom in search of the best ways to teach her young son. First heard about homeschooling 30 years and nine children later, Cindy has become a popular blogger podcaster, and award-winning teacher a journey that she has documented in her memoir mere motherhood, morning times, nursery rhymes, and my journey towards sanctification published by the Searcy Institute.

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and now on with podcasts.<inaudible> Kimberly Deavers is the wife of Jim who’s big generous, supportive heart has over 25 Years, helped her pour love bravely into her projects, including running a classical education. Co-op striving for a more simple lifestyle studying classical education and occasionally riding at her blog, Juniper and willows. She spends most days trusting God to give her the grace and wisdom to raise up four of seven children who still live in their newly acquired farmhouse in rural Kentucky,

where they are working on renovations and exploring the recently discovered secret garden Outback, a seasoned mom. Kim is joining us on this episode of the podcast to talk about morning, time with middle graders, Kim, welcome to the Hello, Pam. It is an honor to be here. Well, we are so, so happy to have you on because you are just one of those pleasant personalities that I really get to enjoy talking to.

Cause we’ve test sometimes on Voxer and we’ve taken some classes together online. And so you always bring a Ray of sunshine wherever you are. So I’m happy to, Well, I’m happy to be here and thank you for that. It’s, boxer’s been a blessing because so many of us stay friends across the nation. So it’s incredible. Isn’t it Is how it helps us build and build this classical education community.

For sure. We’ll start off by telling us a little bit about your family and what mourning time looks like. As you said earlier, I have children that have gone on to get married and have jobs of their own and families of their own. I have one son that has down syndrome and he lives with that. Of course, he’s a 20, he’s getting ready to turn 20 this fall.

And he’s always been involved, I guess, since he was about six years old with who outside of the home during the day during the regular school year, he adds a lot of joy to our family. He’s definitely affected how I parent, how I make decisions, how all of us kind of temper our, I guess, our strong wills, because a lot of times we have to stop and rethink things around here.

And that’s just part of our kind of, part of our culture. And I’m really grateful for that. Although it’s probably been one of the most frustrating thing to deal with at times as I look back over the last 20 years, it’s been such a good lesson for all of us and just doing that old thing of love begins at home, right? Charity begins at home.

So there’s that element that goes into just about everything that I choose to do with the children. I try to put the heart first, every choice that I make. And so I think that has probably been the biggest driving force with our choices to homeschool and in particular varying morning time type things that we’ve done throughout the years, whether they were in school or at home in which we’d had a combination of both through the years.

So it’s kind of our background, I guess my background was morning time. It’s just that you’ve always had some element of it, but it’s definitely been more focused and defined in the past two years, especially this past year we’ve made it more of a priority. Well, yeah, let’s talk about that because I know when you and I were discussing this particular episode of the podcast,

you told me about something special you guys had done so well, first of all, let’s set the stage. Who are you doing morning time with right now in your home? I did not, I did not have a high score this past year doing morning time. She had classes outside of the home, quite a few. She had an act prep class that took her away from home for past a year,

once a week. And she also had all kinds of commitments, like small jobs. And so in, in order for us to be consistent, I just had to say, I’m planning for my in 10 year olds and 12 year olds, a boy and a girl, but 10 year olds, a boy where he’s getting ready to be 11, 11 year old is a boy and a 13 year old is a girl.

And I decided just to plan everything around them. They have for the last past year, our co-op was using a program called DCM, which is a program that covers eight friends, memory pegs. If you will sort of like CC only it incorporates the Catholic faith in the choices that they make. And it rolls around the, every, you know, it rotates on the four year basis.

And last year we did alpha year in that. So during Hawaii, which went from September through may for us, we were using materials that supported that for a lot of our other subjects we were using for instance, in history, it was the ancient years. And so the literature that we picked to do at home went along with those things. So when they came to the end of which I led,

which was quite a job, you know, we in charge of hiring people for the first time, figuring out what, what would happen if someone was absent, one of the tutors. And it was just a lot for me, a lot of responsibility. So a lot of the times we didn’t finish every single thing that went to do, especially the reading part.

So for the last 10 weeks of school, we’ll after our co-op ended for the beginning of may 10 weeks, I made a pact with the kids. I took Aaron Condron planning pages just ripped them out of an old book that I hadn’t finished everything in. And so they were pretty and I decorated them. And for 10 weeks we did just diligence school and we really made it a commitment,

a priority. I said that we’re doing school and we’re not going to even this morning time, one time. And we’re gonna make sure that we make it to karate because they were at the end of finishing up all of their karate training. So we just stuck to that for 10 weeks. It was hard. There were times where we had to miss for certain things like an appointment or someone got sick and I had to take care of them in the family.

And we made it up on Saturday and Sunday. So it was really 50 days of school that we did not miss anything. And it was up on the wall. We could all see the progress we were making. And it was just a lovely experience. It was really, we grew quite a bit, we realized we could do it. Isn’t that huge to realize that you can do it,

you know, if you set your mind to it and make it a priority to realize that you can. Yes. And it’s so much, I had mentioned karate. It’s so much like a sport where you push yourself beyond what you think you could possibly do. And then you go, wow, we did that. You know, there’s that feeling of,

I can do these things and it wasn’t perfect. There were times where, you know, and we’ve talked about this, some on your Facebook page, new people will sometimes say, but my kids, they don’t have a fit in the middle of the literacy part where we’re getting a pair that doesn’t weigh all the way. I don’t know ever if it ever does all the way.

But what happens is that over time with consistency, especially with kids towards the middle school age, and then middle school age, they really start to enjoy the rhythm of it. Even if they think that they don’t, they love that rhythm of knowing where they’re going next, where the next step is. And it’s just the next page that you’re turning to do together or separately or in court,

or, you know, an alternative, you know, altering between person and person. So they really enjoy that comfort of knowing what’s next. And what’s expected even if they rebel. So it’s worth every minute of that. We have rewards every Friday, you would have a reward. They were many, many rewards like popcorn. And then Vivian sleeping downstairs,

which they love to do. My husband, thanks for nets are willing to sleep on the floor, but what they want to do is camp out. And so we would do those kinds of rewards on Fridays. And then at the end of the first five weeks, we did a larger reward. I think it was going maybe to visit somebody, one of our relatives,

cousins, or something, or had somebody over to spend the night or something. And then at the end of the 10 weeks, we had a field trip scheduled. So they got to go somewhere, which funds it being more of a vacation than a field trip, which was beautiful. It just worked out that way. We got to breathe a real five relief,

knowing those books were closed. We were done for the summer. We got to those things that we did not finish, or I just couldn’t work in during the regular quote unquote hubbub of the school year.<inaudible>. I want to break down a couple of things. First of all, you mentioned Cece, you mentioned CCM. And I wanted to point out to our listeners that that is classically Catholic memory is the name of the program.

And it is a memory work program. It’s kind of similar to see, you know, there are some differences it’s basically geared towards Catholic families. I’ve used some of this memory work myself though. We don’t use it exclusively in our homeschool. And so if you’re looking, if you’re a Catholic family and you’re looking at, you know, some kind of program to use,

and you can even find, co-ops like Kim’s around the country that do this kind of memory work in a co-op setting. So I did want to put the name of that out there. Cause I know we’ve got some women who are frantically searching for a pan going, what was that thing she was talking about? I want to write that down now. You’ve hinted at some of the fruits of this kind of,

I love the fact that you gave yourself a 50 day challenge and you said, we’re going to get up and we’re going to do school. We’re going to do morning, time for 50 days. And if we don’t, if we miss, for some reason during the week, we’re going to do it on the weekend and we’re going to hit these five days a week for 10 weeks.

And so could you see a fruit from sitting there and doing specifically the morning time portion? Where’s there some fruit that was born from doing this for so many days in a row There as always. There always is. I mean, once again, the consistency you see fruits, especially if you’re putting beautiful carts, filled wonderful things in front of the children and you’re doing them with them,

you’re going to see fruits. If you’re consistent. When I was thinking about talking to you, I was thinking, what is it that when I say beauty, this brings about beauty. What does, what does that even mean? Because I try to, I try to look at things and caricature, like we’re supposed to do with classical studies. We’re supposed to imagine a caricature so that we can start to understand it and embrace it in our hearts.

So I started thinking, well, what does it mean? The beauty that I’m talking about with morning time and just liturgical practices in the home. And I think that every 10 minutes it establishes patterns and thoughts and rhythm to hold onto throughout the moment of the days. And I wrote the word musical town and the word music of the spheres when we are,

and this is not every single moment of morning time by any means. There were some kind of ugly moments that we have to work through. Like I mentioned before, but when we’re in we’re, we’re being consistent with prayer life, whether it’s me by myself or with the group or a family, it’s certain types of prayers. My prayers, we start to actually develop patterns,

especially in the memory work. I noticed that we started to almost, it seemed like, and this is the character I have in, in my mind right now that I’ve tried to embrace my heart. Is this for drawing figure eight with our, with our mind, almost like we’re skating or doing some type of rhythmic dance, a gentle dance when we’re doing memory work as a group in the morning,

if we’re consistent, because what happened? I noticed this with, because the speech of Patrick Henry for our great words, which is part of the CCM program for this past year, and it is long, and it is not a poem, it’s a speech. And I, you know, at first I was thinking, am I, you know, this sounds like drudgery making us do this every day because it took at first three minutes or something to do it two minutes long.

It was a lot of talking. I had the end of 10 weeks, 50 days of repeating the speech of Patrick Henry that’s excerpts from give me Liberty or give me death 75. Okay. When we got to the end of the 60 day, we had such a cadence and a rhythm that it was musical. And I thought, Oh, that’s perfect. The music of the spheres that we can hear the celestial choirs of angels in our souls from memorizing some beautiful,

inspirational words and that what the beauty is of it. So it’s almost like it’s as if the sacramental life, which we can experience it, church and church communities, of course in marriage and have to them in the rituals. Like we cannot ask the sacramental life by this type of liturgy in the home, not to replace for certain, but to enhance and to bring home what we get at church and to bring that ladder to heaven home so that we understand that that is something that we can,

we should, we ought to hire, to climb every day, whether we’re 10 years old or 47. So that, that community, that communal resetation and work that we did sacrifice that we did was beautiful because of the things that I just described and because the spheres are the understand, Oh, that’s what people were writing about back in the day. It was this beauty that they could hear because they took the time to hear it.

So it’s almost like by memorizing it, you came to understand it better. We did. And I did, we noticed too, and we didn’t really sit and talk about this, but toward the end of the 50 days, somewhere in there towards the end, I began to notice that I would hear something out in the world and I would realize how close it was to what I heard in Patrick Henry speed or in the him that we had studied,

or maybe even it was a grammar resetation that we, we also worked through. I would begin to hear the cadence echoed and something else, Connect it. And go, that is beautiful. You know, or the words that comeback, I would be doing something insignificant, like sweeping the floor. And instead of getting irritated, all of a sudden, the cadence as a line would pop into my head and have a go with this is happening to me.

I sure hope it’s set into the kids. And I I’m pretty sure it did, but we didn’t talk about it very much. Middle schoolers. If you talk about things like that too much, they’re going to maybe not think it’s so good and you know, they might rebel a little bit, but we don’t really talk about it too much unless they bring it up.

I think that’s everything. Well, let’s, let’s get into that kind of, some of those aspects of doing morning time that are very specific to those middle school grades, because you brought up a little piece of it there. So let’s start with that. One of the big elephants in the room is that teens and tweens sometimes have a reputation for being hard to get out of bed in the morning.

So do you have, do you have this issue at your house? And if so, have you made any adjustments to your morning time as a result of this? Oh, yes. In fact, that was the biggest reason we had success. I just let it go. I just said, you know what? I’m not, I like to get up early,

but it still takes me a really long time to be fully awake. And so I totally understand when someone just doesn’t want to get started in the morning. I get that. So instead of fighting them, for instance, I know I wrote it off schedule for the first, probably three weeks morning time, eight to nine 30 or seven years, eight to 12,

because really we do, I’ll get into that in a minute, but we get into more than just morning time when we did this this way. But I would write that diligently eight to noon or whatever we typically started. If we were really on the ball, it was started 10 30. If we were on normal days though, it was closer to noon,

which sounds insane. I know it sounds crazy, but it just worked better. We were awake. I could do some tweaking to my planning. I could do some business for my husband, which I help him with sometimes. And things like that. There were all kinds of things that I could do in the morning. And they had their, this notebook stuff where they’re independent.

So if I happen to get stuck doing something before that time, which happens sometimes around here, they still have things that they worked on. So it wasn’t like they didn’t have anything to do independently, but I, I let go of the rigidity of saying morning time. It’s morning time. In fact, we started calling it table time towards the end of the 50 days,

because this is ridiculous. I can’t call this morning time anymore. And we were laughing. All of it, bang, well, what should we call it? So we made up all kinds of goofy names and family table time is what we stuck with for the end of that and make it more real. The fact that you, you know, you let them make up the goofy names and then pick which one they wanted to use.

So that’s a lot of fun and yeah, I mean, you really have to embrace what works for your family and yet keep the discipline of, you know, even though we’re not going to do it first, we are still going to make sure we fit it in making that commitment. I love that you shifted the schedule to make it work for you guys.

What advice do you have for the mom of a teen or a tween who is balking at the idea of sitting down to morning? Well, I fictions at all. I section it off into several sections and I think that that may help also, and also type it all up exactly what we’re going to do, which takes a little bit of time, but it helps me because what it does is it helps me tweak and plan as I go,

when I’m typing to see what won’t work or what I’ve left out completely or to see, Oh my goodness, I’ve got five hands here. That’s not going to work because we do those during memory time, you know? So it helps me organize it as I type it. So that’s one thing it does. The other thing it does is that I can print out a copy for each binder and it is very important at that age.

I think it’s very important at that age for them to hold their own binder and be responsible turning that page because sometimes if there is an, a really bad attitude going on, you can simply say, turn the page instead of going through a long litany of what they ought to be doing. You know? So I think that there’s sort of a professional to have a binder in your hand.

It’s more real that you’re doing this thing. So you’ve got that object there as they turn the page or turn to the memory section or turn turns the review section for today. So you have the command over it a little bit. Maybe that helped a lot, I think<inaudible>. So do you think them having the schedule and knowing like exactly what was included in what you were going to be doing?

This is it, you know, this is our commitment for today and this is what I I’m asking you to give all in four. And then after that we’re done. Do you think that’s helpful? Well, I do. And if you want me to talk about that our memory binders or morning time matters a little bit, because I think that’ll explain it’s not permanent.

It’s permanent for that amount of time that we set up well for our last 10 week push, it was permanent for that amount of time for Christmas. Tommy had a five week Christmas or pre Christmas binder. But what I do is take the first part as our table. Time is more liturgy focus. I’ve got the words, for instance, our morning can liturgy and bring the bell three times.

That job rotates between the two of them, like the candle, that job rotates between the other one. They switched jobs. The Lord be with you and with your spirit turned to the East that make them turn to the East. Also another solid thing you can have them do that gets the focus back on what we’re doing the objective, rather than the fight that’s going on in their heart.

There’s a, him and I put him up on the mat. We rotate that out, using a program, or they released one him a month. They don’t have the word fit in bold. And then I have my daughter’s name are reading from the book of job. That’s the book that we worked on this year. And at the end, she says the word of the Lord.

And we say, thanks, be to God. As we would in our liturgy at church, then we have the word stand and offends name. And he reads off the gospel according to Matthew, because that’s where we are in scripture. And then in bold, I have crossed forehead’s lifts and hearts saying glory to you. Oh Lord. And it goes on that way,

all the way through the gospel. We did two really long prayers that we’ve worked on for about a year and a half. And I don’t know that we’ll ever really let these go while they’re in, you know, well, I’m homeschooling because they’re so beautiful. They’re longer prayers. And one of them was called the beauty of creation bears witness to God.

There is no author listed in the hymnal that I got it from. And the other one is Lord, that love for me is strong a Saint Theresa. Once again, they don’t tell which sign Theresa, but it’s also a beautiful, longer prayer poem. And then we do a ham and in between the hints that are in our binders, are it come the say no.

Well, that’s why I have it listed out for them. So they know where the Bible reading and in-between the hands so that we’re not doing five hands in a row, we’re taking a him. And then I’m reading to them as three of the sign of the day. And for a while, like if, if whatever, depending on what time of the year it is that we don’t what I read to them during this part of the morning,

time will be focused on that part of the year. For instance, we just finished the day, the sun Sundance, which is a beautiful rendition of our lady of Fatima, the appearance of her. And so we read through that and it normally would have been kind of a drop book for us to sit on the couch and read or need to try to catch them in the car and have them read aloud.

To me, it would have got a little drop of a text, but in this context, during the serious part of our, our cable time, I was able to make sure that we didn’t read too much for it to become too dry for us. You know, maybe a page or patient a fast, but I was able to keep control over that because it was a more serious time.

And this whole thing only lasted about 10 minutes unless we added in an extra reading, just because they were wanting to finish something was usually their request. If that part went longer, then we would move immediately. And to the memory daily work, which we started off with the longer passage that I mentioned from our great words from our co-op this year at Patrick Henry,

that speech. And then we went into heavy review because what we had done, because we had covered so much material already. And I think that’s something that I need to point out was with middle floors. Most of the stuff that goes into my children’s binders for memory work and memory, your view, they’ve already been exposed to multiple times in varying forms.

So what I found is interesting and good about doing table time with middle schoolers is that they do have exposure to so many things. So when you present, you don’t have to do so much explanation with the work. They kind of already know that they need to know their multiplication facts. You don’t have to explain the concept to them. They already know the concepts,

they just need to review and memorize them. Same thing with the grammar, resetation grammar rule. They’re already applying them somewhere else or they have the year before. You’re just reinforcing what they already know. So I think there is a little bit of logic that they might catch on to subconsciously. They see that, Oh, I’ve had this before and they recognize it.

So they know that it must be important if they’re hearing it again. Even if outwardly, they show that they’re kind of annoyed that they have to go through this again. I think that that’s a big relief, but that older group for the mom or the teacher, she knows they’ve had this before. So there’s not a lot of research that has to go into the presentation for Yeah.

And they can see that it’s useful. They may not always like doing it, but they can, you know, if they will stop and admit it, they can see the use of it. So I wanted to touch on a couple of points that you were talking about here. So first of all, you have really set up this mini liturgy in your home.

This is the pattern of morning time that we follow. And I really want to point out to some people who are listening, maybe even people with younger kids, just because they like listening to all of the podcast. And so they don’t have older kids yet. They have younger kids. We really want to point out this is for older kids. This is what,

you know, a little more serious kind of start to the morning. Time can look like in a house where there aren’t toddlers running around. All of the children are older. Now having said that you’re almost using like a toddler distraction technique, where if they start giving you a bad attitude or they start giving you a hard time, you distract them from,

and I love the way you said it from the struggle that’s in their heart by drawing their attention back to the binder. And because you’ve got it all set up, you just say, turn the page. And you know, you’re pulling their attention away from that struggle that they’re wanting to start. And just with that simple, it’s not a fight. I’m not gonna fight with you about it.

I’m just going to direct your attention back to what we’re supposed to be doing. And because I’ve got it all laid out so beautifully, you really don’t have a choice. Yes. With the ages of our children, morning timetable time, it is their religious instruction. It is serious. And it’s embodied in the rhythm and the very rhythm of it That might not work for every family.

Every family might not be like Kim’s family. And every mom might not take the approach that Kim takes, but it’s an option. You know, if you’re struggling, it is an option that you could try. You know, it would be something that I could try with my kids because of my personality. And it might actually bear some fruit if we ever did something like that one day.

And then I know that there are, you know, some other mamas out there. I know who would never try anything like this, and that’s completely okay too. But I just love to me, there’s a certain appeal that your answer is just this simple. We have it laid out and I’m just redirecting you back to what is right to do. Yes.

And another one of those lines that I use quite frequently, we used real candles because of the ages of my children. They used real matches. So they can actually learn how to strike a match, which is sort of a dying art in our culture weirdly. So we had, we pulled out the little bell from the Montessori kids, a little bit metal bell,

and the little candle that looks like a, a church candle, really a small window and a real Snuffer and a real little metal basket to put the match sticks in when they were done. And all of those tools came out. They restored right beside the table. And they came out with the Bible and with the more serious books, you know, the less serious ones were kind of scary,

you know, like grab a basket or throw them on the shelf or whatever right before. But the more serious things were always stored. What I called liturgical props, items, artifacts. So they knew what they were and when they were out. And when that candle was wet, which we, I was almost to the point where I would talk with the,

I had to pass the point, or we finished that liturgical aspects, which I said took between 15 and 20 minutes. That candle was snapped on because I was able to say, when the candle was lit, Hey, the candle is lit. This is not the time to talk about when you’re supposed to go to the orthodontist tomorrow. Why so early that appointment,

you know, it really was another one of those lines. The candle lit can’t talk about that right now. I wouldn’t even have to say we can’t talk about that right now. I would say the candle slit, just move on. So there’s another little lines that would help focus because that went out, we knew that you were a little bit freer to maybe discuss,

Oh, so birds have that book. So there’s something mom, it’s funny because I just read this thing yesterday and they would talk about one of the things that was in the memory work that happened. And I would let it a little bit after that candle was when maybe we get to the memory work Memory, work for you is an extension of what they’ve done before.

You really don’t change the type of memory work that you do. You just continue reviewing. And then you might add a few longer speeches, like the longer prayers that you were talking about, or the Patrick Henry speech that you know, has gotten a little bit longer than some of the shorter things that elementary students might memorize. That is a good point. Okay.

Let’s just say that. Cause they had already been bribed. Maybe let me, if I look back, I could tell you it’s five or six passages or sections of the, how to teach your children Shakespeare. And they’re all in a review day. Cause they have a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday review section that is maybe two or three things to kind of go through.

And I changed that out after maybe two months. And I felt like they had it. I never could get it that quickly. They had it though. They had it maybe in three weeks, Latin, the Latin grammar vocabulary, the Latins vocabulary sheet, there were maybe let’s see, there were about 30 words here, simple words in their definition. They would simply say veer,

man, semi, now, woman, whoever boy who, Ella girl. Okay. They would go through the list like that. Now we do it as well. When I realized that they were not looking at it, I will change that out, but I’ll put it in the same spot. Okay. So you change it out when you realize that they’ve got it and yes,

they always get it so much faster than I really, I don’t even try to keep up with them. I tell them my brain is tired and yours is more plastic and you can make groups a lot quicker than I can and you should. And so I’m amazed at what you can do. That’s what I say to them. I’m just amazed at what you can do.

I love the fact though that you’re doing it with them. Even if you know, you know, you’re not going to catch it. You know, you’re not sitting there quizzing them. And I think this is so important for any age kid. Oh. Especially that age kid, that age is very important to approach them where they are and to love them where they are.

And it’s so, I mean, you know, we all say, okay, well you love your kids can so that easy for you to say, but I did teach kids that were not, not my kids this year, back home, my kids and they’re not my kids, but had taught at our co-op and I wound up teaching seventh and eighth graders and say,

Oh my goodness, they’re so smart. For one thing, that age group is so smart and they love things. They love people. And so if you can meet them where their loves are, it’s just an explosion of goodness out of that. And I’m not exaggerating. It can be a really good experience for the teacher and the mom. So I just urge people to definitely don’t go at middle-schoolers with a quizzing type approach.

It’s so hard not to, You’ve kind of hinted at some of this, but I want to ask you this question. You know, we talk about how morning time is, is an important, you know, the fourth R of morning time is relationship and those middle school years can be so crucial to strengthening and maintaining strong relationships with our kids. So do you think morning time plays a role in your ability to do that at your,

It does. It does. Our relationships have definitely, definitely gotten closer. And there are things that you share. You know, I’ve heard a lot of people talk about this, how even when you read together, those characters become part of your family. And that is true. We all know that when we’ve read to our kids, we understand that and get that.

But I’m also thinking that the experiences we have with our every day grind and our every day joy, you can’t escape that during table time. You’re kind of stuck with each other from whether it’s 15 minutes, because you have a lot of toddlers or you had a special needs child at home at that moment, or whether it’s four hours because you include, as I do the other things like wondering nature,

wondering history, all those things. I include that at the end of our tabletop as part of our D our table. So ours goes line between two and a half and four hours, depending on what we can handle that day. What I can do that day, I can deal with that day because of the age of my children. If they’re, I remember when my kids,

I had C3 under the age of six at home at one point and our morning time was much different. I would occasionally get out the special, they call them, you know, the special liturgical thing. And occasionally I would light a candle and I would sit up on a shelf, you know, but we didn’t do that. Normally, you know,

sometimes consisted of me reading from a religious book, it’s book to them. And then, you know, saying a quick prayer, holding hands, maybe singing a song, maybe putting the video in after that and singing together. It just has to do with the heart once again, where your heart, if he can find your kid’s heart, it’s all about connecting with their hearts,

where their heart is. Even if that is video games, if they’re not your kids, and you’re just coming into this as a school teacher, or if your kids were in public school and now they’re not stuff then that actually had, you know, I’ve done that twice. It’s a, you have to give yourself grace and space and you have to do that for your children as well,

especially that women is going well, what is this? This is weird. What are you doing? You know, I used to just get up and get online and do my schoolwork for you. And now you’re wanting me to do, trying to meet them with what they love and trying to start out really small if you’re starting from scratch with this, especially with middle schoolers and older avid daughter,

like I said, it’s in high school as well. And she loves it when we include her. And we, we always include, you know, with welcome her. We loved it when she came, but she just wasn’t always able to be there consistently. And so it wasn’t always possible. But when she was there, she seemed to really enjoy it because she saw that we were enjoying ourselves.

We were kind of like, the kids were kind of, I don’t want to say proud, but they wanted to show her what we were doing. So there was that too. And when my husband was home, he was listening from the other room after the prayer part was over. He sometimes joined us for the prayers when he was home, the memory work,

we’d lose him, but he’d hear us from the other room and he would always come back and I thought, you know, that’s great. That’s a good thing to do. You know, it really kind of affected our whole family positively.<inaudible>, We’ve talked a little bit about the roles that your kids play in morning time, but they are very,

especially that even past the first 15 minutes, what you were calling the liturgical portion, then into the memory work, they’ve got their own binders. So they do have an important role to play in morning time. So how has your role changed as a member or a leader of learning? I take more time to put thought in the orig in the materials.

And I think because they’re holding their own binders that frees my mind at a little bit, as we’re working to really pay attention, to see if they’re getting bored of something that we’ve had in there too long. Maybe put that on a rotation of once a week on one of the daily reviews instead of every day review. Also for if they’re getting faster at doing some of the memory work,

I may think, Hmm, next week I think we could add one extra little fact or even another. I don’t usually add to the time that we’re doing things because now we’ve got it settled. But in the beginning I added things as we got used to the time. But these last 10 weeks, we were already established with this routine for the most part,

the last 10 weeks, I didn’t vary it at all. I was in the binders, but I knew what to put in there because I had the benefit of them being part of it as long enough, where I could kind of watch your disposition Other than the liturgy portion. Do they ever lead any parts of the morning time? Any of the other parts?

Do you ever have them read out loud? Yes. Yeah. The memory binder, when we’re finished with those daily reviews, which are not the daily review. And then they go to the weekday review, which was very short, we closed the vendors and say we were done with that, but a way, and then depending on what you’re going through that day,

as far as outside commitments with doctor’s appointments and picking up the other child or something, we either moved into what I called. Well, I didn’t really have a name for it because I had, what I did was I had this time where I read to them. So really, I guess I called it my reading time to them, or I would read aloud to them,

but we still sat at the table because during that time there were some independent work like handwriting. I still make them do the handwriting handwriting and maybe copying work and that kind of thing. They just did some things that I’m not going to say it was not endless, but they could definitely work on while I read to them. I think that middle school kids can multitask.

In fact, I think sometimes things that I really want them to know, she can get in there better when they are busy. Yeah. And it’s, they’re using a different part of the brain while they’re listening. I categorize the different types of, I guess, literature based on what, you know, like the list of the seven liberal arts basically.

So what I did was I called it wonder in space, wonder in time, wonder in nature and memory wondering that wonder in math and what I did was I took the material that I found to be very beautiful, that way to make sure that my children heard and were exposed, experienced, or like, and I looked at those out and I rotate those back and forth.

Can you give me an example? Yeah. Give me an example of something that you read. Of course. Okay. So for wonder and faith, we use universe in my hand and we use ha raise stars, but we rotated those around to where we weren’t reading about the stars every single day. So I would work that in, and then we worked our way through the North myths,

that Villiers book, which I know they would’ve thought that would’ve gotten not had we not had time to do that. And I didn’t have a label for it, like a category for it. And it wasn’t written out. Just those stories. We finished that this past year allow like fairytales. We finally made it through that also during this time. Oh.

And then how I included them with these things is that Sasha had too many books in a category, especially at the beginning of the 10 weeks. So it was going, I don’t want all this on my plate because it’s too much and I’ll let them cheat. Especially the history texts. I mean the history classics, the literature, I just laid out fast choices per kid and said,

pick two of those. And that’s what they did. And so they sort of owned it. And even if it wasn’t their favorite book, they knew that they had chosen it. And then we did the bird study notebooking pages and we use Lynn said nature journal, which we did not use as often as I wanted to. That’s my goal for this coming year that we’re going to nature journal,

more Exploring nature with children. I wanted to say the name of it. So we are sure to link it in the show notes was I let them pick The bird. Any of them are through it. You know, I would just go it in front of them and say, okay, pick one. Before I started reading something else and they picked mine and then they were responsible for looking at,

for facts, writing it out and coloring the page. It had to have color on it. I didn’t care what material they use that they had to put color on that page, on that bird that kept them busy while I read other things. It had nothing to do with birds. What I read to them. And then we did raised math every single day,

no matter what we would just pick up where we left off the day before. I guess the only other thing that we did that was not necessarily in that morning time was ever so often. And I did this when I felt like we needed it. So it was maybe once every 10 days, six days, something like that at school, we would do a Lexia,

which was in addition to what we did on our daily basis. It was some special time with scripture, basically meditating on scripture, very quietly and writing a prayer as a family and looking at the picture that went with it and talking about the art, the sacred art. I really want to point out one thing you said that I think is so important for middle school students,

you’re letting them make choices about, Yes, it takes some prayer and discernment and wisdom, and you have to ask for wisdom from God. For that. I don’t believe that there’s very many people that just have a talent of being able to steer the ship and let people make choices, because it doesn’t even sound like it goes together. But we know that when we love people and we learn how to thrive a community and build community,

that that is what it is. That’s the key to it is that there is a leader that leader steers the ship, but that leader also gives people their freedom. And it is just great from Todd that does that. Kim, thank you so much for coming on today and talking about doing morning time with what can be, you know, just a pleasant joyful age,

but what can be a challenging age too? I really appreciate you doing that. Well, thank you. I’ve enjoyed this so much. I’ve enjoyed going back through the year too. That was really good. And there you have it. Now, if you would like links to the books and resources that Kim and I talked about today on the podcast, you can find them on the show notes for this episode of your morning basket.

And that is@pmbarnhill.com forward slash Y M B 38. Now we also have a special little download for you over there as well. Kim has made a printable of her wonder Lou list, all of the subjects that she loops through, what she calls her wonder list that she talked about today on the podcast, wonder in mathematics, wonder in space, those kinds of things.

She’s typed up the whole list for you. And she’s also given you a couple of her favorite books or reading suggestions for each of the topics on the list. So this is a fun little printable to put into your morning time binder. You can find all of that along with, on how to leave a rating or review of the, your morning basket podcast@theshownotesatpambarnhill.com

forward slash Y M B 38. We’ll be back again in a couple of weeks with another great morning time interview until then keep seeking truth, goodness and beauty in your home.