 Hey everybody, welcome to the Waldoch Way. I'm Jessica and today's video is going to be about our morning basket. Now before I actually show you what's in our morning basket, I wanted to kind of talk to you a little bit about morning basket. So if you are brand new here because you are curious about morning basket, I will leave some links in the description box, everything you wanna know about them, how we've used interest-based learning morning baskets, just absolutely everything. But before I go any further than that, I wanted to address something that I know when I tell you is going to be a question. So let's go ahead and just get it out of the way in the very beginning. What is the difference, at least for us in our homeschool and our family, in a morning basket and a unit study? So you guys know that we do both. We've always, for as long as I can remember anyway, themed a morning basket, but we also do unit studies. So for us, what is the difference? The biggest difference for a morning basket and a unit study in our homeschool is the purpose. So the purpose of our morning basket or our morning time is to bring us together. It is to start our day with delight. It is to fill Emily's basket, is to connect with one another. It is to make sure that she feels loved and ready to learn whenever our day starts, whether that's morning or night or whatever, afternoon. But it is so that the very first thing that we do for our homeschool day connects us, makes us happy, fills us up, and that's the purpose. Learning is a byproduct of it, but it is not the purpose of it or the reason for it. I really honestly could care less if we learn anything during morning time because that is not what that is. That will never happen. We will never not learn anything, but that is what our morning time is for us in our homeschool. And it's filled with things that bring us joy. So I absolutely love reading aloud to Emily and she loves me reading to her. So it always includes read alouds. It always includes hands-on activities because the best way for her to enjoy read aloud and hear what I'm reading is for her hands to be busy. It always includes mad libs because that is one of Emily's favorite things. And it just happens to be that a byproduct of that is learning grammar, which is one of my favorite things, sneaky school. And then it almost always includes games because games are Emily's love language. So I know that at the end of our morning time, we have done some of the most important things for me, which is read, play, connect, spend time together. And it sets us up to start the rest of our homeschool day on the right foot. Now the purpose of a unit study is obviously academic. It is for us to learn certain things about a certain topic. Unit studies almost always include some form of writing where our morning basket doesn't because Emily's not a huge fan of writing. So I would never include that in our morning time because that is not gonna start us off on a great foot. We're not gonna have a great day if I force her to do something she doesn't wanna do like the beginning of the day. So for us, that's the difference, literally the purpose behind them. Our morning basket is to bring delight, to connect us for us to fill our love tanks up where our unit studies purpose is for us to learn, right? Like that is the biggest difference in the two of them. Okay, so now that we've got that out of the way, let's go ahead and talk about what's gonna be different about our morning basket this year. So over the years, we've always themed them and we've almost always changed them out on a monthly basis. That is what worked for us when Emily was younger. Her attention span was shorter. She was tired with a topic after a month. We needed to change it up to keep it fresh for me and for her, so we didn't burn out. So monthly was perfect for us. We did it monthly from pre-K up till third grade, ideal. Last year, we even let Emily completely take control. So she picked the topic, she picked everything that went into the baskets, she filmed the videos, she helped me with the blog posts and the editing and she learned a ton from taking over that. It was phenomenal, the experiences that she got, reserving books from the library, learning how to budget her money, buying the things for it. It was absolutely amazing and I would not trade that for anything. But when we sat down to start talking about kind of what we wanted from our morning time this year, a few things came up presented from Emily. One was that a month was no longer working. She's older now, her attention span is longer. She's wanting to dive a little deeper into topics and I kind of felt it too as we were making those changeovers every month, it almost felt like you just weren't quite ready to put the things away yet. Like you just wanted to spend a little more time loving on them. So our morning baskets are going to be longer than they were in the past. How long? I don't know yet, we're gonna play it by ear. However long it takes for us to feel like we're tired of it or ready to move on is how long it's gonna be. So I will let you guys know, I will be back on here every time we switch our morning basket to show you what's in it. But for now, all I can tell you is it's going to be longer than a month. The other thing was that over the past few years there's been a few times when our unit study and our morning basket themes have overlapped and Emily really, really liked that. So that is something that she has asked for us to do at least for a little bit to see if she continues to like it. So our first morning basket of the year since I just told you our plans and for the fall we're going to be doing a huge astronomy unit study is going to be astronomy themed. Now in our morning basket we will have like simple games. We will have some hands-on activities. We will have some fun re-allowed and maybe even some re-allowed that happen to tie into our unit study. But again, only things that she enjoys because she is still picking everything that's gonna go in our morning basket. She is still gonna pick the theme. She just so happens to want it to tie into our unit study. And I am still gonna let her 100% pick what goes into the morning basket. Now, based off of some of the feedback that I have gotten from you guys you love seeing Emily in the morning basket videos but you really preferred when I was the one doing the flip through of the items cause you were able to see them a little bit better. And honestly, I totally get it. Emily's arms are a little bit shorter. It was hard for her to move things on and off of the camera to flip through them to be able to see the camera screen where it's a little bit higher when you're filming that kind of view. So we've decided her decision when we talked about it she still wants to do the intro and she still wants to do the exit. She still wants to pick what goes in it but I am going to actually be the one filming that portion of the video. So there you have it. That is what morning basket's gonna look like at least for now. I'll update you guys when it changes for us again because it probably will and it could. The one thing I have learned in our homeschool journey after five no six years is that you do whatever works for you. So if you were doing it monthly and it works, stick with it. If you were like, this is feeling too rushed. I'm just not quite done. Then maybe you extend it a little bit like us. I mean, do what works, right? It's your homeschool. It's your family. It should be unique to you guys. For Mad Libs and Trivia we have the National Geographic Kids Funny Fill In My Space Adventure. We've done a few of these in the past but we still have plenty more to do. One of my favorite features of this is that there are actual facts over here. So as we're doing them we can also be learning space facts as well as our parts of speech. And then for Trivia, we have the 100 things to know about space. This isn't technically Trivia because it's not gonna be questions but I thought we would read one to two of these little facts a day. They're really, really funny. So we have like living in the universe is like being on a fairground ride that never stops and it kind of tells you more about it. Just a lot of fun facts that will help us learn more about space. Right now for read alouds I have a large stack to go through with you guys but keep in mind that I'm kind of heavily loading our basket because I'm not sure how long it's gonna last this time around. I will update you on whether we've actually gotten through all of them or not. The first book and kind of the main book that Emily picked that she really, really wanted to get through was Dr. Maggie's Grand Tour of the Solar System. So this goes through the entire solar system and we will just read a few pages a day, like no set, so whenever we stop, like maybe a spread, maybe four pages, it'll just kind of depend on how the topics work but we will just go through and read a little bit from this each day and hopefully make it all the way through and have learned a ton about it. But again, that's not necessarily the purpose as long as we're having fun connecting, that's what matters to me. Now for the chapter books that we're gonna be reading aloud, I actually managed to find four of the You Choose books that had to do with space and Emily loves these books. So I thought it would be a really, really fun, interactive kind of way to read aloud in our morning time. So we have The Race to the Moon and Interactive History Adventure, Apollo 11 Moon Landing and Interactive Space Exploration Adventure, a Space Race Interactive Space Exploration Adventure and the International Space Station and Interactive Space Exploration Adventure. And then of course our Who Was books, which are some of our favorite, we have Who Was Galileo, Who Was Neil Armstrong and Who Was Sally Ride. Now it is no secret that I am mildly obsessed with biographies, especially really good picture book biographies. So I have a set that's also gonna live in our morning basket. So we will either read from one of the Who Was or one of these picture books. It's up to Emily, I'm gonna let her pick because really we can't go wrong with any of them. So the picture book space biographies that I have are May Among the Stars The Boy Whose Head Was Filled with Stars, A Life of Edwin Hubble, What Miss Mitchell Saw, Buzz Aldrin Reaching for the Moon, Look Up, Henrietta Levitt, Pioneering Woman Astronomer, One Giant Leap, A Historical Account of the First Moon Landing, Always Looking Up, Nasty Grace Roman Astronomer, Hidden Figures, A True Story of Four Black Women in a Space Race, Caroline's Comet, A True Story, Margaret and the Moon, How Margaret Hamilton Saved the First Lunar Landing, Counting on Catherine, How Catherine Johnson Saved Apollo 13, and The True Story of Alan Bean, The Astronaut Who Painted the Moon. For hands-on activities, I have the Paint by Sticker Kids Outer Space. This is one of Emily's favorite activities to do. It is really fun. You have these images and they are numbered, and then you get the stickers in the back, and you place the stickers on the correct number to create the pictures. It is really fun. It's great for fine motor skills. It's really great if you have a kid learning to count. Super, super fun. Next, I have the Book and Jigsaw Puzzle Solar System. This is a 200-piece puzzle. The Lego Creator 3-in-1. And then the last thing that I have is sensory boxes. Now, this sensory box is by Broccoli Boxes, which they are phenomenal, and this box is gorgeous. But if she needs a change, we do already have the sensory boxes from our moon and space unit study made as well. So we'll have three separate sensory bins that I'm thinking we'll probably just leave under our coffee table, and she can pull out whenever she wants. She's really excited, though, to play with all these little wooden pieces. And then last, but not least, you guys know Emily loves games. Now, we have a lot of space games because we'll be doing that for our morning basket and our unit study. So I tried to put games in our morning basket that would play in 15 minutes or less because obviously we don't want to be spending hours doing a game at the end of our morning time. So the first one we have is Top Trunk Space. Now, we love this game. It is basically a war-style game. You lay down your card and your opponent lays down one as well. Whoever won last gets to pick the category and whoever's number is larger wins. Now, before we lay our cards down, we always read the Top Trunk file or fact at the bottom so that it adds another layer of learning. But it's a really fun way to learn some facts about the different things you're learning about and just play war. Next, we have the Brain Busters card game, Space. This is basically a trivia game. So on the back, you have different questions that you can ask, and then the answers at the bottom. We obviously also have the Professor Noggin's Outer Space one as well. This is one of our favorite games. It has easy questions and hard questions. We normally try to start any kind of study out using the easy, and our goal is to be able to do the hard towards the end of the study. The questions are over here, the answers are over here. The fun part about it is they include a dice. So you roll the dice and then whatever number you get is the number you answer. Whoever has the most at the end wins the game. Brain Box Space. Now I really like this game because it's fantastic for logic. So what you do is you turn the timer over and the person gets to study the card for the time that that until it runs out, and you just study it. You read it, you try to memorize as much as possible. When the time runs out, they roll the dice and then whatever number it is, they try to see if they can answer that. So I rolled a five. So which famous person is shown? So you don't necessarily have to know anything about space. You're just trying to remember as much that you saw as possible. But a side effect is that you happen to be learning more about space as you're doing it. The last game I have is the Skillmatics Connectors Track and Link Mission Space. I love this box, you guys. So it just slides open and stores all the little tiles. And you're basically just taking turns, flipping over and trying to lay your tiles to connect. So kind of just a fun space-themed game.