Symposium

I have had peo­ple ask me about my family’s sym­po­sium time.  You may have heard it ref­er­enced as ‘bas­ket time’ or ‘morn­ing time’, but we sim­ply call it sym­po­sium. If you’re curios­i­ty is piqued, then enjoy this glimpse:

Our sym­po­sium time came out of two observations: 

1. I have a fam­i­ly of morn­ing peo­ple and night people 
2. Pulling indi­vid­u­als from their to-do list is real­ly hard

Before sym­po­sium, at 7 AM, my house would be a com­bi­na­tion of sleepy paja­ma clad boys  and singing jump­ing mon­sters. They each ate break­fast at dif­fer­ent times, some start­ed on their school­work while oth­ers were just try­ing to remain sleep­ing. This sim­ply was not sustainable. 

With sym­po­sium, at 7 AM, my house still con­tains those sleepy boys and those singing boys, but we are all togeth­er and we are all ready.  Yes, some of us are bare­ly awake and some of us are chomp­ing at the bit, but we know what’s expect­ed at 7 AM and we respect each other’s needs.  My singers don’t sing until after sym­po­sium, and my sleep­ers must wake up before it. 

Sym­po­sium is a start­ing point. It is when we come togeth­er in the morn­ing to snug­gle, lis­ten, and plan. 

It starts with the Bible. 

Each day at 7 am, we gath­er and read a por­tion of the word of God. Depend­ing on the pas­sage, we may com­ment on what stuck out to us, nar­rate what the read­ing was about, or ask each oth­er ques­tions. Bible read­ing may go like this: 

1. Review by nar­ra­tion the main point from yesterday’s read­ing for context

2. Read Hebrews Ch 11

3. Ask: What did you hear? 

4. Ask a child to nar­rate the chapter

5. Give overview of the chap­ter high­light­ing the big points or application

It takes us around 30 min­utes to do this togeth­er each morn­ing.  The ben­e­fits to dig­ging in the word togeth­er are limitless. 

The second portion of our symposium is reading a book. 

Most of the time this is a fic­tion book that I have cho­sen for us to read.  It may be con­nect­ed to the time peri­od we are study­ing in his­to­ry or a biog­ra­phy or a a clas­sic. I read one chap­ter, and then recap the chap­ter or ask a child to nar­rate it back to us all. 

We finish our symposium time with schedule and prayer.

I remind my guys of the sched­ule for the day, who’s going to be where when, and what they need to focus on in regards to sched­ule. To fin­ish, one of us prays over the day, often includ­ing the sched­ule and what we learned about from the word in the prayer.

After­ward, we break for what we call “Enrich­ment Hour”, but that’s a whole oth­er blog post.