4 Reasons You Need Morning Work in Your Homeschool Routine
Just like in a regular classroom, the start to your homeschool day may be a little stressful. You may have children who are of different ages, and working on unique skills. Your children may arrive and ready to rock-and-roll, and then you may have a child who is just not a morning person. But it is always great to have a little routine to get all of your children started on the right foot. This is where morning work is a wonderful way to start your day! Here are 4 reasons using morning work in your homeschool classroom can help!
4 Reasons to Start your Homeschool Day with Morning Work
Here are 4 reasons you should start using morning work at the beginning of your homeschool day!
Provides structure and routine
Children often thrive on structure and routine. Even if you homeschool for the freedom and flexibility. You most likely have some type of homeschool structure and routine you follow during the day.
During the morning, you might find your children at all different levels of readiness for school. Some may want to eat breakfast right away, some may be ready to get right into activities. If you give a lot of downtime in the morning, it may make it more difficult to get all of your children back on the same page. Having a good morning time routine can help!
When you put out morning work or morning activities, it gives your children a task they need to complete each day. Some days maybe it is a worksheet, or an activity/game on their iPad or Chromebook.
Engaging activities
You always want morning work to be engaging and fun to complete. This way, you can get yourself ready for the day, making sure you have all materials or worksheets you need.
Now, your activities may look different depending on the age of your children. Morning work for your children who are in kindergarten may involve more cutting, glueing, and coloring. While your students in 4th grade may listen to a read aloud or podcast on their computers, or complete a math worksheet.
It could also be an activity all your kids have to complete together. They may need to create a memory book of your most recent field trips. Your older students write the descriptions, while your younger students paste in the pictures or draw the pictures themselves.
Providing an opportunity for review
Morning work gives an awesome opportunity to also review any skills your children may need a little more practice with. You can easily incorporate standards you’ve already taught to your children and see which ones they 100% know, and which ones you need to look at again. It is great memory work and a great chance to spiral back to areas you have already taught.
Some parents even use morning work as a chance to review what students already know before starting the homeschool year. Maybe you have a preschooler, and you never even realized they knew all their numbers already up to 20. This allows you to really see where you can start with your child instead of starting right at the beginning if you do not need to!
Quick informal assessments
While homeschooling, you are always around to see and help your children when they have questions or are struggling. Which is a huge benefit! But, what if you need data to really show what your child knows 100% on their own?
Morning work is great for informal assessments. It really allows you to see exactly where your children are successful and where they are not as successful. Since these are informal, don’t feel you need to make your children sit there and complete all the worksheet questions, or all of the reading. It is best to look at a couple pieces of data and decide when and how you are going to review the skills with your children.
How to include morning work in your morning routine
There are so many ways to implement morning work into your homeschool day. But, one of the homeschool favorite ideas is having a morning basket. This is where you put all the morning work activities for your kids into a basket in the room where schooling takes place.
By having a morning basket or a homeschool morning basket, you can have an organized space for all of your materials, and your children to grab whatever is in there for them and get started! It gives the little ones the opportunity to feel like they are really taking part in the daily routine of homeschool even if their morning work is to build with play-doh.
Bringing morning work into the school day allows for so many opportunities. It is an easy and relaxing way to start homeschool for the day and gives your family a chance to practice/review their skills, create a routine, and allows you to gather data to better inform your homeschool lessons!
