I should start this blog with a confession: I like being awake in the mornings but only once I wake up. And "waking up," for most of my life, has been a sort of drawn-out, grumpy process. There was a time in my life when I considered 9 am way too early to be thinking about waking up. And now I wake up at 5 in the morning most days. I need that time before my kids get up to get the day started right and my kids, almost without fail, wake up between 5:30 and 6:30.

So, my day starts at five in the morning and if you'd told me that in high school I would have thought you were straight-up insane. But really? It's not so bad.

Right now, my homeschooling life isn't that complicated. If you're reading this as part of the blog link-up and you don't know me, then I should tell you that I have three kids, all of them under three. My twin two-year-olds are the ones I "do school" with, and my almost-seven-month-old hangs out and listens, plays, naps, or poops (sometimes a combination of these).

We have breakfast pretty early (see: waking up time) and then a little after eight, I put the girl I babysit on the bus for school.

Preschool around here starts at 9:30 am, for no particular reason other than we happened to start at that time several days in a row and I noticed. Assigning it a time gave me something to shoot for and make sure I remembered to abandon other projects and take care of school before my kids were nearing nap time.

Wanna know what we do? Every two or three weeks, I pick a new subject -- trains, ocean, space, jungle, etc-- and we go get a bunch of books from the library. Some of the books are usually the non-fiction for kids books (about parts of a train or the planets) and then some are fiction books with the topic or only tangentially related.

So, at 9:30, I say, "Let's do school!" and we all climb onto the couch. We start with a Bible study (right now, we're doing Beginner's Bible cards, which are here and unfortunately discontinued) and a short prayer. That takes about seven or eight minutes total. Then we do our reading lesson, which is mostly just practicing letter sounds and helping with consistent letter recognition. And then we read a stack of books.

Right now, this works really well for us because my boys love the alphabet and they love when I read books to them. If they didn't enjoy it so much, I don't think I'd push it-- maybe try to get through a book or two a day. But now, they usually cry when I stop after seven or eight books and want more. We spend about forty-five minutes, total, doing "school" on the couch.

In the afternoons, we'll sometimes do activities (splashing in the sink, playing with dry rice and cars, painting) or go for a walk if the weather is nice. We'll probably be going outside a lot more as it warms up. Another confession: I need to start actually planning out my activities so I stick to the schedule because I'm not a very consistent arts & crafts person. My boys love hands-on stuff and I just don't get stuff out often enough because I don't want to deal with the mess, even though usually it's only about five minutes of clean-up.

The rest of their school right now is really behavioral and home-life stuff. They work on putting laundry away with me or hang out while I work on chores. They like to use baby wipes while I dust and help me scrub stuff off. They play a lot, with train tracks and Legos and cars.

Finally, in the evening, we all sit on the couch again (husband, too, this time) and read a story from The Beginner's Bible, a Psalm or Proverb (we read in order and we're on Psalms for the second time now), sing two or three hymns (they always, always request the "doxology," which for us is the last verse of "Awake, My Soul, and with the Sun." Then we pray.

I'm super-excited to do more with them as they grow up, but right now, that's pretty much our school day. I have two big goals right now as I teach them and that's to work on foundational stuff about our faith (Jesus loves you, Jesus died for you, this is the Gospel, this is the Word of God) and to foster and grow their innate curiosity into a love of learning. So, basically, some Bibles and a lot of crayons! Ha.

Be sure to check out these other ladies and their posts today in the Homeschool Blog Hop, every Tuesday and Thursday this April!