How to Make a Morning Basket for Preschool Homeschool Mornings
This post may contain affiliate links, which means I receive a small commission for purchases from my links. As an Amazon Influencer, I earn from qualifying purchases. Thank you for supporting the work put into this article by using my affiliate links!
Do you want to start a morning basket for your preschool homeschool but aren’t quite sure where to find the best morning basket ideas? Morning basket ideas for preschool can get repetitive! These morning basket ideas for toddlers that are engaging and educational. Starting a morning basket for homeschool can be the best decision you make for this school year!
Just want to see my favorite supplies? Click here to head to my Amazon Storefront for my morning basket favorites!
Starting to use Morning Baskets is one of the best things I could have done for our homeschool! The name is a bit of a misnomer. While we do use them primarily in the morning, the activities in our morning basket are pulled out all day! When I was thinking about how to get started with our Morning Basket, I decided on six broad categories to target: creativity, fine motor skills, gross motor skills, literacy, math, and problem-solving. Narrowing activities down into these categories makes it much easier to decide which activity to use each week! Keep reading to learn more about the activities I choose for each category!
To see some of our Morning Baskets, click here to see them in action on TikTok!
Arts and Creativity Activities for Morning Baskets
Creative endeavors are loved by children but are often overlooked as activity ideas because they can be messy or aren’t valued as much as a literacy activity! I like to start my planning here.
Building creative muscles is so important and it can be easily done with mostly mess-free materials! Crayons, colored pencils, markers, and even watercolor sets can be used each day with sturdy paper or a mixed-media sketchpad! Stickers and activity books are well loved in our home as well, For older children, learn to draw books would make a great addition! And there are soooo many activities you can set up with a roll of butcher paper!
If you are looking for additional guidance on building your art supply closet, check out this article where I discuss just that!
Morning Basket Fine Motor Skill Activities
Before they can even think about forming letters or numbers, young children should work on developing strong hand muscles and fine motor skills! Playdough and clay are great for working those hand muscles and are also very entertaining for children! But fine motor skills involve more than just holding a pencil. Working buttons and buckles, lacing and threading, picking up objects and putting them in a line…all of these actions are important to practice as well!
Sensory bins are great for developing some of these skills, as are various line up activities and skill specific toys like the buckle penguin or a busy book! When your child is ready, tracing activity books and scissor skills books are always a big hit among kids ready to play school!
Gross Motor Activities for Morning Baskets
Gross Motor activities and body control are often overlooked parts of morning time but can be just as important as the others! As much as we’d love calm and quiet in the morning, little ones need to move their bodies!
It’s tricky to find (mostly) independent activities that help build Gross Motor skills but they exist! One favorite that is so easy to set up is animal hide and seek! Just hide some small animal toys around the room for your child to find. Other well loved activities are building with blocks, ramps and ball runs, yoga or activity cards, dancing, and movement games!
Literacy Activities for Morning Baskets
I think when most people think of Morning Baskets, they think of Literacy Activities! Books are wonderful additions to your Morning Baskets, especially when they’re books you’ve read again and again. Hearing your children “read” the books to themselves or a stuffed animal is so much fun!
In addition to our weekly and monthly read alouds, there are other activities you can add to your Morning Baskets to support literacy skills. Alphabet and letter sound activities are great but phonological awareness skills like rhyming are also so important to learning to read. Vocabulary Cards are also loved by children for whatever reason and are easy to toss into your baskets for an extra activity!
Math Morning Basket Activities
After literacy activities, I think the next category of activities people jump to when planning their Morning Baskets are math activities! Early numeracy is just as important as early literacy! But many people focus solely on counting or number formation without also focusing on quantity and one to one correspondence.
In addition to counting and numbers, we also have shapes and patterns and sorting to cover! There are plenty of free activities you can whip up with things you have at home for all of these activities. But if you’re short on time or want some more durable activities, these are my absolute favorites for teaching foundational math skills!
Problem-Solving Morning Basket Activities
This is the last category I pull from when creating Morning Baskets for my preschooler! Problem Solving and strategy are important for little learners and it’s a tough skill to explicitly teach. Children need time to experiment and troubleshoot on their own to build this muscle!
There’s a wide variety of activities you can add to your morning baskets to support problem solving! Search and Finds, games, building, and puzzles, are our favorites. Some of these activities won’t necessarily “fit” in your basket but placing them next to the rest of the activities does the trick!
Morning Baskets are great additions to your day, whether you homeschool or not. I hope this has inspired you to create your own Morning Basket for your little one. They are a great way to start the day slowly, with intention, and also buy you some time to drink your coffee hot!
For support planning your Morning Baskets, check out the FREE Morning Basket Activities Planner for Notion! It’s easy to use and will change the way you plan your Morning Baskets!
