Charlotte Mason Homeschool: Morning Time Memory Box
I’m not a morning time person. By that I mean I’m not a morning basket kind of person. You know the type? The beautiful basket filled to the brim with books to foster connection and community with your group of children.
I do have the basket and it is filled to the brim with books but I view it as a graveyard of sorts. A place where all my lovely morning time homes and dreams go to die. It turns out I wasn’t a morning basket kind of person because for the last 5 years I’ve been a “finish school as fast as possible before the toddler loses his mind.” kind of person. Unfortunately that meant things like morning baskets lived on the side of the couch and the back of our minds.
Earlier last month I had the privilege to attend the Charlotte Mason Educational Retreat in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The keynote speaker was Cindy Rollins, author of Morning Time: A Liturgy of Love. In her many talks, Cindy encouraged mothers to implement morning time in their homes. Suddenly all my reasons for not doing morning time seemed silly and I came back with a new desire to collect all the things we schedule through the day and week into a cohesive morning time.
While we’ve worked on memory work, scripture memory, and recitations for a several years. I’ve often struggled with having a system in place where we actually remember what we were supposed to remember. we almost never revisit past recitations and memory work.
In order to devise a system to help with our memory work better I borrowed ideas from Simply Charlotte Mason’s Bible Memory and my dear friend The Whispering Glen.
Each month we work on memorizing various things in poetry, history, civics, science, bible verses, and latin. I include these in our new morning time plans instead of spread throughout the day.
At the end of the month I print off our memory work on sticky paper and put it on a post card to be filed away in the correct section of the box.
Throughout the year we can pull out various cards to review.
Supplies:
Sticky Paper to print on
Post Cards
Recipe Box
In full transparency, we have not used this system long enough to know if it is going to work long term but I’m excited see if this helps us stay accountable to committing our memory work to memory long term.
