I had never heard the term “morning basket” before I started homeschooling, but then I saw it everywhere. It’s now something that I incorporate into our routine, but I wish I had known about it years ago before I was even homeschooling. This is a tool that can help establish some rhythms and routines for any family.
What is a Morning Basket?
Put simply, a morning basket is a basket full of things to engage your children in meaningful activity at the beginning of the day. For many homeschooling families, this is a time for religious practice, and you’ll find lots of morning baskets that contain a daily scripture as a way to spend time reflecting on its meaning to start the day. We’re a secular homeschooling family, but we still appreciate the chance to start each day in a gentle way and to add reflection and intention-setting into our routine.
What’s in a Morning Basket?
All kinds of things! Really, there are as many ways to do a morning basket as there are families, but there are some great ideas out there:
- Poems
- Books to read aloud together
- Handicrafts like weaving looms, crochet, or cross stitch
- Scripture or meditations
- Hands-on experiments connected to a recent lesson
- A board game
Often, morning baskets will mix together different activities and materials so that they can appeal to multiple age groups and so that the kids can do something active (like using the weaving loom or playing with play-doh) while listening to poems or stories.
Why It’s Not Just for Homeschoolers
While morning baskets are an entrenched homeschool tradition, they can be useful for any family. Now, when my daughter was in public school, if you had told me to add something else to the morning routine, I would have laughed so hard. There was not one single second to spare in our morning, and trying to do one more thing as we found all the shoes and juggled all the bags and made it to the car would have been anything but gentle and fun.
But that doesn’t mean that this practice can’t be useful for families in other educational arrangements. Here are some ways that “morning” baskets could be useful:
- After school baskets– The hour after picking my daughter up and entering the house was often a kind of tailspin for us. It was too early to make dinner, and I didn’t want to immediately start on homework when she had just gotten out of school. She was often wound up and a little agitated. Having a calm, peaceful, and fun activity that we did together would have been a great way to transition from one part of her day to the next, and having it waiting on the table when she walked in the door would have been even better.
- Weekend morning baskets- Start a morning basket tradition that’s only on the weekends (or even just on a single day of the weekend).
- Bedtime baskets– Flip the script and turn the “morning” basket into the “nighttime” basket. Use the same idea of a gentle transition to end the day instead of beginning it. It gives the family a chance to do something meaningful together that signals the start of the transition into sleeping routines.
Since we added the morning baskets to our routine, we’ve had a lot of opportunities to have great conversations. Most importantly, it has given my kids a chance to look forward to some time we have carved out just for us, and they are always excited to peek into the morning basket and see what’s waiting for them.
