The Morning Huddle
A few months ago, I tried a new strategy to help the kids organize their plans for the day and, hopefully, teach them a little more about how to be responsible for setting daily goals. We will take inspiration wherever we can find it, and the inspiration for my new strategy came from my husband’s job. On some mornings, his team gathers together for a morning huddle to make sure everyone knows what’s going on with the team and can discuss opportunities for collaboration. What a great idea for my kids! Now, I didn’t do the best job of implementing my morning huddle with the kids for the last few months, as I was entrenched in lesson planning every day and had to dig myself out of piles of books just to find a way off of my couch, but I’m determined to make this part of our day as we begin a new season.
Early mornings can be a bit of a challenge to coordinate my routine with my kids. Some homeschooling moms will talk about how they get up extra early to have some quiet time before the kids are up. Yeah, that’s NOT happening in my house. My oldest son is up at the crack of dawn (or even earlier). If he sleeps until 7:00 a.m., he is disgusted that he slept in. I can hear you gasping. It’s really true. To make it even more astounding, he wakes up with the energy of a caffeinated squirrel. When I get up, he jumps up to give me a hug and tells me all the things he’s gotten done already. He doesn’t get this from me. I don’t sleep in very late, but when I get up I need a little time to stretch, take some deep breaths, and engage in a little self-reflection. I just need a little extra time to feel fully awake.
My daughter wakes up like me. When she gets up, around 7:00 a.m., she slowly emerges from her room and immediately grabs a fiction book. I let her read for a while, but then I have to try to coax her out of her book to get her attention and point her toward the work she needs to get done. I always feel a little bad doing it, because I love how much fiction she reads, but without a little prodding, she will hide behind her E. D. Baker books (that she’s read about half a dozen times) and procrastinate all morning.
Then there’s the little guy. He is usually up pretty early, and I am incredibly grateful that either my husband or my oldest son handles him in the wee hours of the morning. My oldest son gets that “ready to go” attitude in the morning from his dad. When I first see my husband in the morning, he’s often returning from a 12-mile bike ride. At that point, I’m just glad that my body finally feels awake. While my husband is biking long distances early in the morning, my oldest son will often keep his little brother engaged in the morning until I’ve had a few minutes to myself.
Once we are all up and going, and my oldest son has finished half of his independent work for the day, we sit on the floor together and talk about what we need to get done, both individually and together. We will also talk about some weekly goals and, if it’s the beginning of the month, some monthly plans. Our morning huddle today was quite lengthy – much longer than I expected. There seemed to be lots of interruptions, especially from my four-year-old. He was SO incredibly excited that he got to have his own chart to check-off tasks and that he was going to get some time to work with Mommy like the big kids. He was SO excited, in fact, that he wouldn’t stop talking. I love his enthusiasm, but it slowed us down quite a bit this morning!
My goal for instituting the morning huddle – getting together early in the morning (well, early for me, anyway) to talk about our daily plans – is that it will help cut down on wasted time later in the day. Kids can come up with lots of excuses for why something didn’t get done. They can also take ages to get out the appropriate books and materials we need when it’s time to begin a lesson. If we talk about the plans early in the morning and they write things down in their planners, it’s a little harder later that day to convincingly argue that they didn’t know they were supposed to complete their history maps or finish their writing assignment from the previous day, or that they didn’t know we were going to do the extra activity from the history book and they were supposed to make a photocopy of it.
Do I recommend you use the morning huddle strategy for all kids? I think setting out some simple expectations at the outset of the day is useful even for young children. As kids get older, they need opportunities to complete more work independently. They won’t learn to be responsible if they aren’t given the opportunity to BE responsible, even if it means there will be days when they fail. But, then again, that’s an important lesson, too.
