102 Interesting Things to Explore In Your Morning Meeting
Since the beginning of our homeschool journey, we have loved starting our days with a morning meeting. Right after breakfast, or sometimes even during it, we’ll grab the pile of things we’re working on in our morning meeting and get started.
The pile could range anywhere from mapwork to card games to a read aloud to a bible study. Most of the time it’s a mix of these and everything in between! If you’re just starting out on your own homeschool journey, or if you want to revive your morning meetings a bit, I’ve got you covered!
For us, morning meeting has been a chance in the day where we set aside about 45 minutes and connect with each other through a handful of meaningful learning–a way to start our days together before we get busy with our own lists.
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This post includes a huge list–102 things in fact!–of things you can start doing during your morning meeting.
What’s the Deal with Morning Meeting Anyway?
Our morning meetings have changed quite a bit over the last 12 years. Sometimes we’ve been in a rut and need some good ideas. In our morning meeting right now, it looks something like:
- The Bible Project + Bible Reading together
- Read Aloud
- Go over our day/week
- Picture books (lately, they’ve been from this list)
It’s short and sweet and sometimes I’ll add in a game–like tomorrow, we’re playing this. But currently, we need short and sweet.
The following will give you tons of great ideas for you to use in your morning meetings, separated by theme: history + geography, awesome story treasuries, bible + character, memorization, logic + math, card games, creative ideas, and more!
History + Geography in your morning meeting
The key to a great morning meeting is keeping all the things short. You can really cover a lot of things just by taking 10 minutes on each item. Here are some history and geography ideas you can do in just a little time.
- Play with Pin-It Maps
- Geo Puzzles
- Professor Noggin’s geography games
- Timeline games
- Play Sequence States + Capitals game
- Read a chapter from Story of the World
- Work out of a map drawing book
- Look through a Fandex. We have the Civil War and Mummy ones.
- Listen to Around the World Stories (Read about how we use it here!)
- Read a chapter from a great historical fiction book
- Practice the 50 states + their capitals
- Play the Scrambled States of America game
- Use a Chalk Pastel lesson for an easy video tutorial on drawing maps–the video guide makes it so easy!
Read Treasuries together
I absolutely love reading through a huge treasury of stories together as a family. It’s different than a read aloud that builds on itself each day. These chapters are not connected to one another, but a fresh story every day! Here are a few to get you started:
14. Julie Andrews’ Treasury for all Seasons// One of my very favorite poetry collections!
15. Fables by Arnold Lobel // Also see: Character stories by Beautiful Feet Books
16. James Herriot’s Treasury for Children
17. The 20th-Century Children’s Book Treasury: Picture Books and Stories to Read Aloud
18. HarperCollins Treasury of Picture Book Classics: A Child’s First Collection
Bible + Character
Starting your day together doing some sort of bible study or bible reading is a great way to start the day. Admittedly, a lot of days, the bible studying we do in our morning meeting is the only bible reading I get to during the day. Here’s some good ideas for studying the bible together in your morning meeting:
19. Go through the Beautiful Feet Books Character study in your morning meeting. The books included in the study are just the best!
20. Sing hymns or use the verses for copywork.
21. Watch The Bible Project videos–these are so excellent and their website has bible reading plans that we use.
22. Read The Jesus Storybook Bible
23. Read from an etiquette or manners book.
24. Read a biography of a martyr or missionary.
25. Use study cards from the Tiny Theologians
26. Read about saints from Cloud of Witnesses
27. Read The Ology
28. Play Bible Sequence
Things to Memorize During Morning Meeting
The morning meeting is such a great time to work on memorizing. There’s virtually 100’s of things you could memorize together, but here are some ideas to get you started:
29. Spelling words
30. Use the book 30 Days Has September for TONS of ideas!
31. Marie’s Words vocabulary
32. Grammar Songs
33. Scripture
34. Poems
35. Items from this CD. It has TONS of both simple and complex facts to memorize.
36. Address and Phone Numbers
37. Months of the year
38. Phrases of foreign languages
39. Days of the week
40. Colors of the Rainbow
41. Skip counting
42. Roman Numerals
43. The parts of speech
44. States and Capitals
45. Continents and Oceans
46. Countries and Capitals
47. Directions on a compass
48. The Great Lakes
49. Mountain Ranges of the world
50. The planets in the solar system and order from the sun
51. Human body systems
ALSO: Head HERE for a huge list of more ideas of things to memorize.
Logic + Math
My kids are not big fans of math. That’s why we have to call in the recruits! But if we make a game out of it, they are way more open to it! Math and logic are very different concepts, but I like to lump them together. Here are some ideas:
52. Practice math facts
53. Play Spot-It--my kids ALWAYS beat me at this!
54. Play Rat-a-Tat Cat–this is a great game for strategy
55. Play the Telling Time game
56. If your kids like workbooks, pull a page out for them to work on while you read aloud.
58. Read from Bedtime Math
59. Play Yahtzee
61. Use geoboards
Play Cards!
We absolutely love playing a quick card game! There are so many that just take a few minutes and can wake up the brain and you’ll be learning too. Here are some of our favorites!
63. Missing Socks (Like Go Fish, but with a fun twist)
64. Robot Rummy
65. Hearts
66. Snap
67. Blink
68. Super Tooth
69. Trash Pandas
70. Zeus on the Loose // Great game for math concepts
71. UNO
72. Quiddler // Great game for spelling
73. Phase 10
74. Too Many Monkeys
75. Loot
76. IOTA
77. In a Pickle
78. There’s a Moose in the House
79. Cribbage // Great game for strategy and counting
80. Set
81. Five Crowns
82. Gubs
84. Slamwich
85. Sushi Go
86. Sleeping Queens
87. Wig Out
Get Creative in your Morning Meeting
One of the easiest ways to get get a lot of reading done in our morning meeting is to keep their hands busy doing something creative. But I don’t want to make a big mess or do anything long and drawn out. Here are some ideas:
88. Weaving Loom
89. Snap Circuits
90. Large Puzzle
91. Write in the Nature Observer journal–it is so good!
92. Coloring books
93. Look at these Famous Painting Cards
More Fun Ideas for Morning Meeting
There are so many ideas you could do in your morning meeting, this list could be 1002, but here are just a few more fun ideas:
94. Read from your favorite read aloud
95. Go over the calendar together
96. Talk about current events
97. Look at the weather
98. Play Professor Noggin games–there is one for just about every topic you could think of.
99. Read from THIS book of idioms and learn a new one each day.
100. Build something with Magna Tiles or Keva Blocks
101. Do copywork
102. Work on a nature class. We just started THESE online nature classes and are SO impressed! The first lesson we did was on spiders and even my teen + tween that aren’t excited about anything loved it! 😉
Hi, what is the book in the picture that has the 10 x 1 = 10 and so on and the lift the flaps?