Hi friends! Today I want to share with you what is in our book basket this school year!
You may have heard others call it a “morning basket” or “morning time” but we call ours a book basket because we regularly get to it in the morning. 😆 Usually it happens during lunch or later in the afternoon, sometimes even after dinner or before bed at night! We also only do things from our basket around 2x per week, not everyday.
Our basket contains a mix of great books and items we use to learn fun facts and character building. We also do some geography work, artist studies, and a Bible study all together.
Here is everything we are using this school year:
Bible Study
Each year we complete a family Bible study or unit together. Last year we did The Mass Unit from Into the Deep Co. and absolutely loved it! It was simple to use all together, has some easy hands-on activities, and taught us all so much!
This year we are continuing with Into the Deep Co. and doing a unit study on The Beatitudes. We just started this one but are really looking forward to it!
I love this flip-book that is easy to turn to each day and helps kids with practical and real life lessons. Each page gives a lesson or tool to teach manners as well as role-playing exercises and challenges, and a simple “why” behind each lesson.
I love to use these geography cards from The Good and the Beautiful to continue to practice where different states, continents and countries are located. Last year my older two kids mastered all the 50 states, so this year we are focusing on learning where all the European countries are located. This will also be helpful as we study the Middle Ages for history this school year. My younger two kids are working on their continents and oceans.
Each time we sit down with our book basket, we review the cards they have previously learned and then try to add 2-3 new cards. We continue to practice them throughout the school year.
*This geography card set includes cards to identify the oceans, continents, countries, provinces, states, regions, and capitals. Grab them on sale while supplies last!! They are being discontinued!
These Usborne Famous Paintings cards have been so fun to learn about and be able to identify popular works of art. Each week we pull one new card to learn. The back of each card shares the name of the art, who the artist is, where it was made, the medium of the art, and some interesting facts about the artwork. We add the new one to our stack and review the ones we have previously learned.
My kids love history so this is a great book they love to look through each day! On This Day in History shares one page for every day of the year featuring events that happened throughout history on that day. It has a great mix of important events as well as fun facts and bizarre events. Wars, peace, inventions, sports, etc. We have learned lots of interesting facts!
This has become our new favorite book to increase our vocabulary! This book teaches one word from each letter of the alphabet. It is so interesting how they take the sound of each word and turn it into a pun for the story. The stories help explain the meaning of the word. By recalling the story and the pun, children are able to remember what each word means.
An example: the first word for the letter A is Abasement. The story is of a bear who works on the highest floor of a company. He doesn’t do his job well so keeps getting lowered to other levels of the building, until eventually he is sent to work in a basement. The word abasement means to lower in rank or position. Kids can then remember his story of being lowered in position to a-basement (abasement) and remember the meaning of the word. Genius!
We read one story/word each time we sit down with our basket but my kids are always asking to read more! I love how this book works and I’m even learning more vocabulary myself!
This is a fun unit study my kids were interested in doing from The Good and the Beautiful. They will be learning about different composers, instruments, music and hymns. It is student led with video lessons and has a simple workbook portion to complete. There are 22 lessons and we are only doing one per week (and even miss some weeks at times. 🫣)
*Having multiple kids, it saved me money to purchase the PDF and print them each their own copy.
Common Sense Press- Digital Literacy
This is an amazing FREE resource from Common Sense Media I found that I’m excited to start implementing with my kids. These are lessons on digital safety, AI literacy, social media, screen time, and more! Each lesson has a simple video, discussion, and game or puzzles to go over what they learned.
I think this is so important to start talking about and sharing with our children in a largely tech and digital world.
They have lessons for every grade K-8 and 9-12. Since I’m doing this with all my kids together, I just picked a middle grade level to start with (3rd grade.) We will probably only do one lesson per week.
Bones & Muscles
This year for health and science my boys have been working on memorizing and locating the different bones and muscles in the body. I printed these simple printables (bones template, muscle template) laminated them and added velcro dots to the answers so we can use them over and over. This is something they are able to do quickly and will continue over the entire school year.
That’s everything! It might seem like a lot but a lot of these things, like the geography and art cards or the On This Day in History book, only take a minute or two. We also switch off doing a Bible lesson with a Music Appreciation lesson or whatever we have time for.
I try not to stress too much if we don’t get to our book basket some weeks. We do the best we can and it really is just some extra things for fun and further practice.
Some other great books we have used in our basket previous years and enjoyed:
Everything Under the Sun by Molly Oldfield. A curious question every day of the year!
An Animal a Day by Miranda Smith: one animal each day and a few fun facts about them!
Indescribable by Louie Giglio: 100 Devotions about God and Science
I hope this was helpful and you found some new things for learning!
Have a great week!!
– Lindsay
