I wrote a while back about starting a secular morning book basket. I wasn’t sure it would stand the test of time, but it’s truly become one of our favorite parts of the day. It starts our day off cozy and connected… and covers many subjects so if the afternoon goes haywire… we at least got something in. 😉
Last month we were studying India, so many of our book basket books were about India. This month our Asian travels have led us to Korea. You’ll find a wide variety of fiction and non fiction books about Korea in our morning basket this month, in addition to science, history, and even meditation this month.
We found many of these books in our local library, but I know not everyone has a great library near by or is willing to travel an hour to get to one (like we do lol). I’ve linked up the books in our book basket to Amazon, so you can read more about them, reviews, and buy them if you so choose. <3 All the links below will open in a new window, so go ahead and check them out, you won’t lose your place. 🙂
We do not read all of these books every day. We pick and choose something from each “topic area” and sometimes a couple for our country of the month. Sometimes books lead to rabbit trails, and we follow those as well. Don’t get overwhelmed by the number of books in our basket… we just like to have lots of options. <3
Let’s get to the books!
Secular Morning Book Basket ~ Korea
Korea:
Our next Asian country to study is Korea. We try to create a good mix of history, culture, and of course food! In our studies. We have a lot of books to choose from in the morning. We also supplement our culture studies with movies, and video and cooking, in the afternoon. You can see how we did this for our India study, and I’ll put a post together of all the resources we used for Korea when we finish up. 🙂 Here are our book basket books.
Food In Korea (not available on Amazon)
Try This: traveling the globe without leaving the table
South Korea Enchantment of the World
North Korea Enchantment of the World
Countries of the World South Korea
Science and History
My kiddo is not super keen on history, so I try to find a way to pull history into science, and our culture studies. She did choose the History Year by Year book when we were at the bookstore one day, and it’s proved to be an asset in our morning basket.
Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World
National Geographic The Science of Everything
Small World Maps and Mapmaking
National Geographic Concise Atlas of the World
DK Smithsonian History Year by Year
Art
This is the first year we’ve really worked to incorporate art into our studies. In addition to our morning basket books we also borrow a work of art from the library, and get a book about the artist as well. Last month we picked up a piece by Maxfield Parrish, and really enjoyed looking at the artwork in our home for a month, and learning more about it. For morning book basket I like to keep is simple, and just work on the skills of looking closely and discovering the kind of art we love.
Personal Development.
I got the idea for the fables from Julie Bogart from Brave Writer. We just started them recently, but we are really enjoying them. They are short, but often lead to fun conversations, and are an easy way to bring up real life situations in a way that can be really helpful to work through them. We have been practicing meditation for a few years now. I thought it would be a nice way to start our mornings. We aren’t finding this book as helpful as I had hoped, but we are using an app on my phone to do a little meditation each morning.
Planting Seeds Practicing Mindfulness with Children
Our Arrow for the month:
The Secret Garden is our 3rd arrow from Brave Writer and we are enjoying each one more and more. I particularly love learning grammar and literary elements through good books (and movies). Last month we read The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe, and studied “breaking the 4th wall”. We accidentally ended up watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and I got so excited when he turned and talked to the camera first thing! It was a great way to really show breaking the 4th wall. 🙂 If you aren’t familiar with Arrows, you can learn more about them here. You can also pick and choose your own Arrows by buying them individually (which is what we did this year). We liked the book line up from last year a lot, so we went with those books.
There you have it, the books starting our day. Do you have a secular morning basket? I’d love to hear about the books you have in yours! I’m always adding to ours. 😉 Come by and share your books in my private Secular, Relaxed-Eclectic homeschool for older kids group on Facebook! We’d love to have you!!
So glad to find someone else using a secular morning basket! I have an 8th grade daughter. This is our fist month using a basket and we are really enjoying it. I have one that is full like yours. For art we are enjoying Vincent’s Starry Night by Michael Bird. The rec. for that came from Emily over at Build Your Library. For Poetry we have several but the one we read daily is called A Poem For Every Night Of The Year. We are really enjoying that. Everything else rotates based on whim. We are enjoying The Outsiders as a read aloud right now and also some short stories and fables. Sometimes we include a game like rummy roots or a quick round of professor Noggin. We’ve been reading through the Usborne Book on survival skills too. Sounds a bit strange but I found it covered some topics I never thought to discuss with her. This is still a new thing for us so I am sure we will alter how we do things as we get used to them. I really enjoyed your post and found some great ideas. Thanks!
Haha we do Poetry Tea Time so we have a whole separate basket for Poetry 😂 Sounds like you’ve got a great basket going! ❤️
What a fun idea! I don’t do “baskets,” but we do try to start the day with reading and like feeling like we’ve gotten something accomplished at breakfast!