2026 2027 Simple Morning Time Notebook

If you've ever struggled to make morning time consistent and engaging, this might be the missing piece. This simple morning time notebook completely changed the way we do morning time by making everything visual and easy to follow. In this video, I'm walking you through the entire notebook and showing you exactly how we use it in our homeschool If you're looking for a way to simplify your homeschool, I suggest you try morning time. Morning time was something I was introduced to as a new homeschool mom. We had I think two kids in school and then another child was about to start and I really wanted to be able to keep doing all of the riches with my kids. Poetry, composer study, artist study, memory work. We did a lot of memorizing verses and memorizing different speeches and quotes. I wanted to continue some of that but I didn't know how to do that with so many children that were just starting school. Morning time opened up a whole new world of possibilities for us and one thing that really made a big difference for me was when I made morning time a visual. When I made a notebook of what we were going to study for the whole year, printed it out, made one for each of my kids, that way we all had a visual right in front of us. It was a game changer. I did this several years ago and I thought you know this would be a great thing to share with other people. So about four years ago, I shared my first simple morning time notebook with all of you and just invited you to come along with us in what we were studying for the year. This has continued to do so well and I'm truly honored that you all are enjoying my simple morning time notebooks. So I am going to be sharing with you in this video about the 2026-2027 simple morning time notebook that I've created for this year. This is volume number four. This is everything that I will be studying with our kids for the whole school year. I'm going to leave a link for you below. I'm selling them for nine dollars. I've tried to make this affordable for families. For nine dollars you can purchase this. Print out as many copies as you need for your family. I only ask that you don't widely distribute, that each family individually buys your own simple morning time notebook. If this is your first time here on my channel, hi my name is Sheri. I'm a Christian. I'm married to my high school sweetheart. We've been married for 25 years. I was a former public school teacher and did not think I would someday be a homeschool mom. My husband and I have 10 kids and we just finished our 16th year of homeschooling. We have two graduates, seven in school next year, and one preschooler. I love homeschooling. It's been such a wonderful lifestyle change for our family and that's why I enjoy coming on here every week encouraging you and sharing helpful resources on the blog ourlifehomeschooling.com. I also have a brand new course Beyond School the Home Education Breakthrough where I share the complete approach I've refined over 16 years raising and educating our 10 children so you can build a home education lifestyle that truly works for your family. To learn more about it click on the link in the description box below. I want to lay out for you exactly what's in my morning time notebook this year but before I do let me just share with you a little of the philosophy behind it. From the very beginning of my homeschooling experience I was introduced to Charlotte Mason. I love her method and I especially enjoy using Ambleside Online. You don't have to have any specific kind of curriculum to use this morning time notebook. It fits with any curriculum, any family. However the Charlotte Mason approach and the classical approach really blend nicely with this. As our family grew I wanted to find a way to make Ambleside Online keep working as well as I could while meeting the needs of our growing family. I loved doing composer study, artist study. I loved learning hymns every month. We learn a new hymn and these are things I wanted to continue but I didn't know how to do it in our family as we were adding another school-aged child every other year and this morning time notebook really helped me do that. I also love some of the parts of classical education and if you know that much about Charlotte Mason she had a classical education so many of her ideas were rooted in that philosophy. One of the things I love most about classical learning is the focus on memory work. When kids are young this is the perfect time for them to memorize famous speeches, scripture, words, lyrics to hymns and so that's a part of our morning time notebook as well. The notebook is divided into two sections because that's how our morning time works. The first are the daily subjects that we always do and the second half are the regular subjects that we loop and I usually pick about two or three of these after we're done with our daily work to do for the day. So I'm just going to start with the daily subjects. I read a bible story three days a week with our kids and I like to use Katherine Voss's The Child's Storybook Bible but you can really use anything that you want and then one day a week we substitute the bible story for a Christian hero. So in the notebook there's a section for you to write down your bible reading plan and your Christian hero plan, what you'd like to read for the year. The next part of our daily work is scripture memory and we're memorizing some amazing verses this year. I like to memorize with our kids in chunks rather than in random short verses and so that's the approach I take. I pick a couple sections from the Old Testament and a couple from the New Testament. In the Old Testament we're doing Deuteronomy 32 1 through 4, Joshua 4 21 through 24, Jeremiah 9 23 through 24. We're doing a section from Psalm 119, Isaiah 55, Philippians 4 4 through 8, that great passage that says, Rejoice in the Lord always again I say rejoice. We're learning from Colossians 3, the passage that talks about above all these things put on love which binds everything together in perfect harmony. We're doing some other memory work as well. We're learning the 12 tribes of Israel, the 12 judges of Israel, and the kings of the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. There are 19 of Israel and 20 in Judah. These may seem like random bible facts but I can tell you from experience that it's really helpful for kids to know these because these give just a basic scaffolding to the bible especially the books of the Old Testament. In these you learn about the kings and when they reigned and as you're reading all the history if you know the kings in order it just makes it more personal and it doesn't seem like you're reading random names that you can't even pronounce. We learned the kings of Israel and Judah through an awesome song on YouTube and I'm gonna leave the link in the blog post for you to use if you'd like to do it. This is how we've taught the kings of Israel to my kids years ago. It's just a really fun song and I do think it's helped them understand the bible, the Old Testament, more clearly by knowing the names of these kings and judges. Our kids also wrapped up the Revolutionary War at the end of this year and they're going to be continuing from there so I wanted to read a speech by Patrick Henry. So this is his speech The War Inevitable where he ends with give me liberty or give me death. I'm not going to have the kids memorize it. It's kind of long but what we do for what we've done for other speeches like this is we'll just read it once a day every couple days and by the end of the year they may not have it memorized but they have parts of it memorized and you'll hear them say it or just talk about it randomly because it's very familiar to them. The concepts are fresh. Another part of our daily work is our hymn study. Our family sings a hymn as part of our bedtime routine so we don't actually do it in morning time but we do keep track of the hymns we do every month. We do a different hymn a month and we write them in our morning time notebook so that we're all keeping track of the hymns we've learned throughout the year. Let's move on to the regular subjects. So these are the things that we study on a loop. After our daily subjects are finished I'll pick two or three of these and we'll spend five to ten minutes on each of them. The first is poetry. I pick two poets a year to study and we memorize a handful of their poems. I usually try to pick a younger kid poet and an older kid poet. So the younger child poet that I've picked for this year is Christina Rossetti and we're memorizing some of her poems like clouds, a frisky lamb, who has seen the wind, the gift, growing in the veil, what do the stars do, and months. That's a really great one because it goes through the months of the year and you just learn a little tidbit about what each month is like. She has poems that are so easy to memorize and they just stick in my kids minds because they're usually about something specific like a lamb or clouds or the wind. The older child poet that I picked for this year is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I just love his poem The Children's Hour. It's just the dearest poem and I taught it to our kids. Our older two sons have graduated but when they were young this was one we memorized. I also have A Psalm of Life and a shortened version of Paul Revere's Ride. That's a great one for kids to know especially when you're studying U.S. history. And the last poem is The Village Blacksmith. I like to use the art prints from Simply Charlotte Mason to teach our kids picture study and we'll pick two artists but I have also in the past picked an artist and just shown them the pictures online. So if you are limited by your budget don't think that you can't do picture study just because you can't afford to spend extra money on some of these things that are not the essentials. You can do picture study online. It is nice to have the portraits in hand. I've left it up to you to pick the artists that you want to study. And then because I think it's more helpful to have kids write out each of the pictures that you study. I think kids remember it that way. I've left it blank. I like doing it this way rather than writing down the portraits we're going to do. It's kind of like a reverse way of doing it and I think it's more meaningful for kids. They have to learn how to spell them correctly, capitalize the first letter of each word in the title of the print. And then there's a little section where they can draw maybe their favorite painting. We also spend some time on composer study. For this we also do two composers a year. This is blank so you can choose which composers you enjoy. I would recommend the Opal Wheeler books. They're great to go along with whatever composer you're studying. It's just a short biography of all the most popular composers. Each book is a different composer. So I think we've done Mozart and Beethoven. We might have done some other ones in the earlier years. But you can pick two composers and then there's space for you to choose five of their best songs. The next section is folk songs and we do a different folk song every month. Now we love using Amblesight online so if you're looking for some great folk songs I would reference that site first but you can also pick your own folk songs. If you have some heritage and you want to bring that back into your family you can pick the songs that are important to you. The next subject in the notebook is Shakespeare and if you've done some of our previous Morning Time notebooks I always picked two plays for you but I've had enough requests for some of you who wanted an editable version of this book. I quite honestly I don't know how to do that and I don't have the time to research how to do it. It's just easier for me to keep it simple like this but I decided to leave the Shakespeare plays blank so that you can pick your own. Sometimes kids learn Shakespeare plays at co-op or other places and so maybe you don't want to do the same ones that we're learning. I've left them blank but I've given you just an outline of how I teach Shakespeare to our kids. I like to read the story of the play twice. First we read it from Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare by Edith Nesbitt and the second time we read it from Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb. The first book is just a simple introduction. It's for younger kids and so it just gives them an idea of the play. Shakespeare plays can be just they have deep plots and twists and people disguised as someone else. It gets so confusing so if you give them just a general synopsis and then you read the story a second time in Tales from Shakespeare. This is a little bit higher level. It includes a lot more details but after the first reading they already have an idea of the story and the fills it in a little bit more. And then if you want to go on with your older children and listen to the whole play or read the whole Shakespeare play I highly recommend the Archangel Audio Recordings. Recently in the past two Morning Time Notebooks I've included a page of math review and I've enjoyed it so much. I don't know if you have but I just like something that's short but something we can learn all together that just refreshes some of the ideas of number sense and measurement. Measurement was what we did last year. This year I've included a hundreds chart and a whole bunch of games that you can play. These are short games. You don't need any special equipment or anything. For example the first is to put your hundreds chart in a slip cover and give your kids a dry erase marker and have them color all the even numbers and observe the pattern. You can also have them color all the multiples of four or five whatever number they're studying and multiplication and then just notice the pattern with that. So it's very simple games that you can do with a hundreds chart. I'm excited about this one. I think some of my younger kids are really going to enjoy this. I've included spelling patterns again in the Morning Time Notebook. I like to teach spelling mainly through copywork. Kids learn how to spell when they practice copywork over a long period of time and I'm not talking about like a month or two or even a year. Years of regular daily copywork teaches kids so many language skills and spelling is one of them. But in addition to that I like to just introduce them to some typical patterns and rules that they're going to see in spelling. I have 25 of these and the last notebook had the second half of those. This notebook I'm circling back around and I have the first 12 patterns and rules. I like to just read these and we'll get a whiteboard out and write some examples of the pattern. So perhaps we might be doing the rule when you have two vowels together. The first one says its name and the second one is quiet. I might write an example of boat which has O and A, two vowels together. And I will just show them the first vowel says its long sound O and the second vowel A is quiet. And then I'll ask them to give me more examples of that rule. It's just a visual way for them to see and to think to generate some of those words on their own. Another subject that we loop through is what I like to call a proverb a day. Proverbs is full of wisdom if you read it but when you read a whole chapter there are often so many nuggets all in one chapter that it can be overwhelming. Almost like being having a fire hose at you. It's just more than you can handle. So I have grouped these according to different categories. This year the categories I have are generosity, diligence, pride, prudence, and truth. And under each category I've just picked about five or six random proverbs that are an example of that topic. And so what the way I do it is to read one proverb a day. We just read it and I ask the kids can you think of anything? Is there anything that comes to mind? Or have you ever seen this illustrated in life? Or has this ever happened to you? It takes us five minutes but it's just a nugget of truth that the kids walk away with for the day. I like to review grammar skills with my kids all together. They do have grammar lessons usually starting in around fourth grade. They'll start a formal grammar program. But it's nice to do a review together. And so this year I have one page of grammar charts that just shows the questions you ask to help find a noun or an adjective or an adverb. A list of the prepositions of the helping verbs of the be verbs. This is just a reference sheet. And then the second sheet is a list of 30 sentences. These include simple and complex structures and also some phrases and clauses. The way I like to do this is to take one sentence a day, write it on the whiteboard, and I start by labeling each word in the sentence with the kids. And the kids help me. I'll ask them pick out words that you know the parts of speech. And so we'll find the nouns, the adjectives, the verbs. Then the second thing we do is write that word's specific role. So if it's a noun, is it a subject? Is it an object? Put more specifically what it is. If it's an adjective, is it an article? The third thing is to circle or put parentheses around the prepositional phrases. You can do this first if it helps eliminate part of it and break the sentence down for you if that's helpful. But we like to find all the phrases. And then the last thing is to take our sentence that we've now put into all its pieces and diagram it. This is something that takes about 5 to 10 minutes when you're doing just one sentence. I have 30 sentences so if you do one a week you should be able to get through them by the end of the year. We spend a little time throughout the year studying geography. This is something our kids also do independently. I love using satara.com. It's a free online program that the kids can get on. They set a timer for 10 minutes and they do different sections of the world usually by continent. They'll study a continent. They'll learn all the countries, capitals, the physical features. But I also like to do a review in morning time. Last year we studied South America. The year before it was North America and so this year I picked Europe. And we just have a blank map and I have a list of all the countries and the kids are going to label them. Usually the way I've done it is to pick about four or five countries in one morning and we'll just try to label those. I have a Kingfisher student atlas which I like to use to find things on a map and then the kids will label their map. There's a couple physical features for them to look for as well but not too many. They also have a section in here where they can write the capitals of each of the countries that they label on the map. Nature study is something else that we really enjoy doing. Our kids keep their own nature notebooks as part of their independent work. It's on their checklist. But I have some nature study pages because it really is nice throughout different times of the year if kids bring in different specimens that they've found on a nature hike to just sketch those in their morning time notebook. My kids notebooks are usually completely filled out with drawings not just on the nature study pages but everywhere by the end of the year. And then the last page is a book list where you can keep track of the books you've read aloud. I don't always read aloud in morning time but if that's something you like to do you can keep track of that or notes that you have. I am really excited about what I've put together for our kids this year. Again I'd love for you to join us. Let me know what questions you have about the morning time notebook. I'm going to include links to the simple morning time notebook below. It costs nine dollars. You can print out as many copies as you need for your family. Thanks for watching. I do one video a week on homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. I'll see you next week.