Angela sent me these wonderful ideas after she read last week’s guest blog post that Suzanne wrote on Character. This was too good to keep to myself so I asked her if I could share this with you and she said, “Yes”! I have included links for the resources that she has mentioned.

My “Morning Knowledge Nuggets” (a title the kids and I came up with last year when we started homeschooling) is my chance to “start the day in the right way” and get in some “tidbit” lessons that I might not get a chance to otherwise.

We begin with our prayers and a daily devotion/bible verse.  Then we do our “Character Connection” with a lesson or activity for the character trait of the month.  I also include an Etiquette lesson (the kids love the book from the Etiquette Factory) and an “Ethics” lesson where we try to tie it all in and talk about morals and values (I discovered at the end of this year that the kids loved hearing Aesop’s Fables and trying to guess the moral of the story…great discussions).

Sometimes I’ll throw in a “Sticky Situation” from a book I have by the same title that is a devotional.  It depends on what day it is, as we do each of these things on one day of the week (or take more as a situation presents itself).  There is also a second book, Sticky Situations 2

After “Character Connections,” we do our “Grammar Game.”  This is something short to reiterate grammar basics.  Sometimes we take a sentence for the week and  do something different with it each day, like Monday-label parts of speech, Tuesday-label sentence parts, Wednesday-label sentence type, Thursday-talk about capitalization, punctuation, and review the week, and Friday-“quiz”-apply what we’ve learned to a new sentence of the same type.  (btw, this all came out of a need to desperately improve our grammar fundamentals!!)

Other weeks, I’ll do something short and “fun” (although the kids don’t always think so!) to reiterate a difficult concept, what we’re learning that week, or something new that isn’t quite covered in our lessons.  Then we do a bit of German and end with our journal writing!  Sometimes we are done in a half or less, other times it takes an hour for all of it.  But I always feel like our day is a lot more complete when I can get in these “other” important things!  🙂