Welcome back to the “5 Essentials for Homeschool Enchantment” series! Today’s post is dedicated to one of the easiest essentials to implement in your homeschool, and it’s also one of the most delightful: book baskets.
Whether you use a morning basket, a bedtime basket, or simply strew bins and baskets of books around your home, you probably already know how wonderful this concept can be. Book baskets can be so many things: a teaching resource, an invitation, an escape, a smorgasbord. They can enhance the lessons you are doing in your homeschool, gently inspire new interests, invite impromptu snuggling, and provide some much-needed alone time for your kids (and for you!) And the best part? They’re so easy to implement:
Step 1 – Find container of some kind. (Need not be Insta-worthy.)
Step 2 – Fill with books.
Step 3 – Leave in an accessible location.
In our homeschool, we are self-proclaimed book fiends. In a family otherwise dedicated to some semblance of minimalism, we can never seem to have enough books around. I go to the used book store at least two or three times a month, and library visits practically double as my upper-body workout. Therefore, we love our (several) book baskets:
Morning Basket
This is typically filled with both fiction and non-fiction books that enhance what we are learning about in homeschool. (You can read a whole post about our morning basket by clicking here.) Right now, it features a book on Charles Darwin to compliment our insect unit study, a couple of the books for our spring Book Seeds issues for STEM and nature study, and one of our perennial favorites for poetry. We also keep our Brave Writer selection in the morning basket (though it’s missing in this picture.) Currently, we’re reading Charlotte’s Web.
Bedtime / Evening Basket
Our bedtime basket is probably one of our favorite parts of homeschooling. It changes weekly, but always features something for math (often Life of Fred or Bedtime Math), something that highlights another culture (we love using books from Jamie Martin’s Give Your Child the World: Raising Globally Minded Kids One Book at a Time), children’s books in French (currently Harold et le Crayon Violet), one of Blake’s early readers (currently The Fire Cat), and our evening read-aloud (currently Among the Meadow People.) You can read about our bedtime basket by clicking here.
Random Baskets Everywhere!
In addition to our more deliberate morning and evening baskets, we keep several bins around the house filled with even more books. Right now, there’s a bin in our main “homeschool area” (our living room) filled to the brim with books on every kind of insect. There’s another one in their bedroom full of fairytales from the library. And I have my own next to my bed in our room, and it currently holds several books I’d like to read this summer (Watership Down and Rebel Without a Crew) and a few favorites that I use constantly when teaching our girls (Handbook of Nature Study, The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs.)
These baskets are free for anyone to enjoy at their leisure, and often lead to many rainy-day snuggle sessions.
Do you use a book basket (or several) in your homeschool? What’s in it right now? Feel free to share in the comments!
Read more from the 5 Essentials for Homeschool Enchantment series:
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