One thing I like about separate years is that the younger kids get to hear from the older ones “Oh, I loved that book….or I remember this chapter, its crazy”. Very encouraging for the younger ones. :)
Thanks for sharing! I’m excited to see that in the future. I can already see the separate years being really helpful for my oldest two who tend to compete a lot. That’s almost erased now that they are separated!
I started studying CM over 5 years ago. One thing I loved about CM was that it went well with family homeschooling. I cant imagine teaching 3 separate grades in a CM curriculum. That is A LOT of books! We are doing Ambelside for the first time this year and we are combining Grade 3 and 5. My 5th grader hasn't learned about the Renaissance yet and he wants to so I'm taking history from 3rd grade, but my 3rd grader loves plants and growing food so we are taking 5th grade science. We are mixing up the literature, my 5th grader is a fabulous reader so I thought he could do a little self reading if we get a bit too book heavy. Math of course is separate. Id love to hear what your year was like, sounds a bit overwhelming but with the short lessons its deff possible.
Thanks for all the details on how you're planning to combine years. Seems doable! I may end up doing a bit more family style for some of our literature pics. I just posted a video on our year end wrap up for AO, and go into detail how it went with 3 levels!
We use AO as well! Starting in January I will have a Y4, Y3, and Y1 also 😊 this will be a change for us because up until this year I combined everyone for most things. I’m excited about everyone having their own books, and also intimidated!
O wow so neat we will have the same years! We’ll if it’s an encouragement to you, having separate years and books has been doable, though it is a lot of reading. I’ve had to cut one book for each kid to decrease my load. I’m loving how each kid has their own special work though. It’s really helped with the competition between my oldest 2. Id love to hear how it’s going for y’all! You should start a TH-cam channel so I can learn from you! For real!
This was so helpful. I am going to be doing some version of Ambleside I'm sure in the coming years. Loved hearing and seeing the suggestions with the binder to stay organized. Genius!
Thank you! So far the binder has been clutch for keeping everything in one easy to grab spot. I am toying with the idea of getting the kids each a small 1/2 inch binder to keep their copywork, recitation print outs, maps specific to their year, and math pages in. Right now it's all in this one big binder (except math) and it's feeling a little full. I'd love to hear how other AO parents do it!
Honestly I plan to but most of the Ambleside Online moms have recommended not adding a thing. But i already own about 5 or so other unused Arrows/Darts and LOVE the way they do gentle grammar so I’ll probably use them in some way. Probably as a family read aloud, like lion the witch and the wardrobe for example, and use the passages for one day’s worth of copywork and the weekly dictation. And then go over the grammar included. Long term if we stick with Ambleside I’m not sure if I’ll continue buying more Brave Writer products though. We may just be able to recycle through some of the ones I’ve already used in previous years for teaching grammar via the Darts/Arrows. I think that would be doable to reuse the guides as the littler ones get older, even if we didn’t reread all the book choices. We will see! I’ll def continue with the rest of Partnership Writing this year as there’s some fun projects left that are creative I’d like to do. Maybe one every other month or something. My oldest (10) will just start out doing some written narrations this year but there’s no creative writing happening yet via Ambleside at least that I’m aware?
Please share the link for the Shakespeare characters. Thank you for sharing. We will be starting AO Year 3 and 4 in September. It's so difficult to get the books in South Africa so will have to be grateful for digital. All the best.
Awesome you are doing 2 of the same years we are! Here's the Shakespeare coloring pages link: tidd.ly/3KHTXxd . You can find that sellers shop and they have them for all the plays! That's tough you can't get as many books there. Have y'all tried Librivox recordings yet? I think I'll use that some this year to relieve the reading amount. I've seen a lot of people use that as a free audiobook version of many Ambleside books! Hope you have a great year too :-)
This is so helpful especially as I’m starting on AO. Is it wrong to skip to year 1 for kindergarten? And can you share your term list formatting please? As an editable version? 🙏🏻
Personally, I would not skip to year 1 for a kindergartener. But it may depend how hold and ready your child is a kinder? Personally, I'd read the level 0 books from the master booklist, and as many others as you like from the library. The main reason is that when they get a little bit older, even by year 1 or 2, the readings may get too long or too hard pretty quickly. Since AO is advanced already, I'd be more inclined to start a child a year under rather than a year over their grade level. Hopefully some other more experienced mamas will chime in. The FB group is so helpful too and I've seen this brought up a few times. Also, the schedule here is printed from their website. Just got to the correct year and the link is at the top.
I'm nearing the end of Year 2 with my almost 8 year old and still doing Year 0 for my 5.5yo and 4yo. Personally, I think Year 1 is excellent for a 6yo or a 7yo to begin with. While I think you could make it work for a 5yo... it just would not be as pleasant and enjoyable of a kindergarten year - especially because each book is meant to be narrated afterwards. Also, because so many of the books build into future years that I think you'd end up having to edit a lot of the schedule when it advances too quickly. The history and science books are also better after having become familiar with the Year 0 characters (I'm especially thinking of the Burgess animal stories) and once they're a little more mature bc of content. What my K year has looked like and is looking like again is: 10-15min K math, 5-10min phonics, 5min letter forming 3-4 days a week plus riches (not necessarily ones on AO site - can be more simple folk songs than on the AO list, for example, John the Rabbit, You are My Sunshine, etc) informally woven into their days. I also am reading a nature lore book (Among the Meadow People/Pond People, etc), literature treasury (Fairytales or My Bookhouse volumes 1-3), and Vos' the Child's Story Bible, and Mother Goose rhymes at breakfast - not requiring narrations but giving opportunity. Then simple drawing and art skills picked up through an achievable handicraft and how to draw books a couple times a week. They also love starting a nature journal by this point but I don't assign any entries, just as they are enthusiastic and want to remember what they've seen. Really K year is just building a family rhythm that includes learning/singing/etc, good habits (attention/concentration, truthfulness, etc) and strengthening that mom-child bond. I remember when we got into Year 1 and I had to track days for the state, my son started to realize that things we've always done together counted as "school" - it was so precious to me that the atmosphere and disciplines were just normal daily pleasures and not a checklist to him. Hope this helps!
Can you explain your reason to switch to Ambleside since I know you loved the Brave Writer so much? Was there any holes to that curriculum that you felt like switching? Thank you!
I didn't find any holes in Brave Writer Darts and still think it's fabulous. I'm planning to use it this year as we have quite a few Arrows we haven't used. I just don't quite know how I'll "fit" it in. My idea is the book could be our family read aloud, a chapter a day maybe. This year we're doing daily copywork with AO instead of just once a week from Brave Writer...so I'll pull Monday's copywork from Brave Writer Dart or Arrow just like before. Tue-Fri copywork will be something else. We're supposed to start weekly dictation (from anything) with AO starting age 10, so I could just pull that from the Brave Writer copywork passage. The one thing we'd really be "adding" to AO, is the grammar parts of a Dart or Arrow. Perhaps this is biting off too much but it seems doable to me if I can schedule which days to do it so I don't forget!
Yes, just with my 10 year old 4th grader. I won’t start any of the others on it till they are 10 as well. We will slow down a lot though, and instead of daily I’ll probably do 2 times a week. He’s finishing level 2. I know formal spelling isn’t required using Charlottes methods but I do want to incorporate learning some of the formal rules.
@acky6174 the other thing I’d try if you don’t have Facebook is to go to the Ambleside online website and click on their forum page. Sign up with a username, get approved by them, and then you’ll have access to tons of help and free resources. I think there’s a bunch of free stuff just like this there. Maybe not the exact same one but I know a lot of free resources get shared on there too.
I did aim to buy physical books for all the scheduled reads for my 3 kids so I could see what we are doing. I really like having book in hand and really dislike reading from a screen if I can avoid it. But it’s more expensive to own books, even at half price used. And books take space to store! A lot of people use LibriVox recordings (free to listen), the library, or use the cheaper kindle version to read. Most people seem to use some combo of physical book/audiobook. We are going to play around with audiobooks too, to help decrease my reading to the two younger kids. Thankfully my year 4 has now taken on all his own reads via books except Robinson Crusoe which has helped tremendously! I read everything else to the others at this point. AO isn’t opposed to audiobooks, but they recommend limiting too many audiobooks so that kids can (as soon as they are able) read the actual books to help with the visual aspect of seeing words for spelling, reading harder words etc. I see this as ideal, but in reality some kids just need to be read to longer and if the parent has a hard time fitting all the reads in audiobooks could be a huge help.
They are from target, but I am going to switch these out. I’ve noticed that the wire bottoms are starting to cause the books to get smallish dents/tears on the bottoms so I need something flat to hold them.
Thanks so much for this - I have tried joining the facebook group a few times, and they are specific about answering 3 questions but i am always only given 2 - and then my request is denied, do you know what I am doing wrong?
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One thing I like about separate years is that the younger kids get to hear from the older ones “Oh, I loved that book….or I remember this chapter, its crazy”. Very encouraging for the younger ones. :)
Thanks for sharing! I’m excited to see that in the future. I can already see the separate years being really helpful for my oldest two who tend to compete a lot. That’s almost erased now that they are separated!
We just started our first year with Ambleside Online! We love it so far.
Awesome! We are really liking it too!
Good work! What a beautiful feast you have set out for you children!❤️
Thank you! I’m sure we’ll have lots of bumps to figure out but it feels good to have a system of some kind!
I started studying CM over 5 years ago. One thing I loved about CM was that it went well with family homeschooling. I cant imagine teaching 3 separate grades in a CM curriculum. That is A LOT of books! We are doing Ambelside for the first time this year and we are combining Grade 3 and 5. My 5th grader hasn't learned about the Renaissance yet and he wants to so I'm taking history from 3rd grade, but my 3rd grader loves plants and growing food so we are taking 5th grade science. We are mixing up the literature, my 5th grader is a fabulous reader so I thought he could do a little self reading if we get a bit too book heavy. Math of course is separate. Id love to hear what your year was like, sounds a bit overwhelming but with the short lessons its deff possible.
Thanks for all the details on how you're planning to combine years. Seems doable! I may end up doing a bit more family style for some of our literature pics. I just posted a video on our year end wrap up for AO, and go into detail how it went with 3 levels!
Super helpful in my consideration for using this curriculum for the next school year!
You are so organized! This looks beautiful
Thank you!
We use AO as well! Starting in January I will have a Y4, Y3, and Y1 also 😊 this will be a change for us because up until this year I combined everyone for most things. I’m excited about everyone having their own books, and also intimidated!
O wow so neat we will have the same years! We’ll if it’s an encouragement to you, having separate years and books has been doable, though it is a lot of reading. I’ve had to cut one book for each kid to decrease my load. I’m loving how each kid has their own special work though. It’s really helped with the competition between my oldest 2. Id love to hear how it’s going for y’all! You should start a TH-cam channel so I can learn from you! For real!
This was so helpful. I am going to be doing some version of Ambleside I'm sure in the coming years. Loved hearing and seeing the suggestions with the binder to stay organized. Genius!
Thank you! So far the binder has been clutch for keeping everything in one easy to grab spot. I am toying with the idea of getting the kids each a small 1/2 inch binder to keep their copywork, recitation print outs, maps specific to their year, and math pages in. Right now it's all in this one big binder (except math) and it's feeling a little full. I'd love to hear how other AO parents do it!
I love all the amazing books!! Are you still planning on adding Brave Writer darts and writing projects?
Honestly I plan to but most of the Ambleside Online moms have recommended not adding a thing. But i already own about 5 or so other unused Arrows/Darts and LOVE the way they do gentle grammar so I’ll probably use them in some way. Probably as a family read aloud, like lion the witch and the wardrobe for example, and use the passages for one day’s worth of copywork and the weekly dictation. And then go over the grammar included. Long term if we stick with Ambleside I’m not sure if I’ll continue buying more Brave Writer products though. We may just be able to recycle through some of the ones I’ve already used in previous years for teaching grammar via the Darts/Arrows. I think that would be doable to reuse the guides as the littler ones get older, even if we didn’t reread all the book choices. We will see! I’ll def continue with the rest of Partnership Writing this year as there’s some fun projects left that are creative I’d like to do. Maybe one every other month or something. My oldest (10) will just start out doing some written narrations this year but there’s no creative writing happening yet via Ambleside at least that I’m aware?
You such a wonderful job. Thank you for sharing with us 👏🏼
Thank you. Hopefully there’s something helpful for you in here!
Please share the link for the Shakespeare characters. Thank you for sharing. We will be starting AO Year 3 and 4 in September. It's so difficult to get the books in South Africa so will have to be grateful for digital. All the best.
Awesome you are doing 2 of the same years we are! Here's the Shakespeare coloring pages link: tidd.ly/3KHTXxd . You can find that sellers shop and they have them for all the plays! That's tough you can't get as many books there. Have y'all tried Librivox recordings yet? I think I'll use that some this year to relieve the reading amount. I've seen a lot of people use that as a free audiobook version of many Ambleside books! Hope you have a great year too :-)
@@LizBlueandHazel Thank you x
This is so helpful especially as I’m starting on AO. Is it wrong to skip to year 1 for kindergarten? And can you share your term list formatting please? As an editable version? 🙏🏻
Personally, I would not skip to year 1 for a kindergartener. But it may depend how hold and ready your child is a kinder? Personally, I'd read the level 0 books from the master booklist, and as many others as you like from the library. The main reason is that when they get a little bit older, even by year 1 or 2, the readings may get too long or too hard pretty quickly. Since AO is advanced already, I'd be more inclined to start a child a year under rather than a year over their grade level. Hopefully some other more experienced mamas will chime in. The FB group is so helpful too and I've seen this brought up a few times. Also, the schedule here is printed from their website. Just got to the correct year and the link is at the top.
I'm nearing the end of Year 2 with my almost 8 year old and still doing Year 0 for my 5.5yo and 4yo. Personally, I think Year 1 is excellent for a 6yo or a 7yo to begin with. While I think you could make it work for a 5yo... it just would not be as pleasant and enjoyable of a kindergarten year - especially because each book is meant to be narrated afterwards. Also, because so many of the books build into future years that I think you'd end up having to edit a lot of the schedule when it advances too quickly. The history and science books are also better after having become familiar with the Year 0 characters (I'm especially thinking of the Burgess animal stories) and once they're a little more mature bc of content. What my K year has looked like and is looking like again is: 10-15min K math, 5-10min phonics, 5min letter forming 3-4 days a week plus riches (not necessarily ones on AO site - can be more simple folk songs than on the AO list, for example, John the Rabbit, You are My Sunshine, etc) informally woven into their days. I also am reading a nature lore book (Among the Meadow People/Pond People, etc), literature treasury (Fairytales or My Bookhouse volumes 1-3), and Vos' the Child's Story Bible, and Mother Goose rhymes at breakfast - not requiring narrations but giving opportunity. Then simple drawing and art skills picked up through an achievable handicraft and how to draw books a couple times a week. They also love starting a nature journal by this point but I don't assign any entries, just as they are enthusiastic and want to remember what they've seen. Really K year is just building a family rhythm that includes learning/singing/etc, good habits (attention/concentration, truthfulness, etc) and strengthening that mom-child bond. I remember when we got into Year 1 and I had to track days for the state, my son started to realize that things we've always done together counted as "school" - it was so precious to me that the atmosphere and disciplines were just normal daily pleasures and not a checklist to him. Hope this helps!
Can you explain your reason to switch to Ambleside since I know you loved the Brave Writer so much? Was there any holes to that curriculum that you felt like switching? Thank you!
I didn't find any holes in Brave Writer Darts and still think it's fabulous. I'm planning to use it this year as we have quite a few Arrows we haven't used. I just don't quite know how I'll "fit" it in. My idea is the book could be our family read aloud, a chapter a day maybe. This year we're doing daily copywork with AO instead of just once a week from Brave Writer...so I'll pull Monday's copywork from Brave Writer Dart or Arrow just like before. Tue-Fri copywork will be something else. We're supposed to start weekly dictation (from anything) with AO starting age 10, so I could just pull that from the Brave Writer copywork passage. The one thing we'd really be "adding" to AO, is the grammar parts of a Dart or Arrow. Perhaps this is biting off too much but it seems doable to me if I can schedule which days to do it so I don't forget!
Are you planning on still using All About Spelling?
Yes, just with my 10 year old 4th grader. I won’t start any of the others on it till they are 10 as well. We will slow down a lot though, and instead of daily I’ll probably do 2 times a week. He’s finishing level 2. I know formal spelling isn’t required using Charlottes methods but I do want to incorporate learning some of the formal rules.
Where did you find the printable for the AO folks and hymns? I would love to have that!
It was in the files section of the Ambleside online Facebook group 💕 search folk songs and hymns and it should pop up.
Is there any other way you think? I don’t have Facebook? Those are so nice. I made some really rough copies out of the anthology book.
@acky6174 the other thing I’d try if you don’t have Facebook is to go to the Ambleside online website and click on their forum page. Sign up with a username, get approved by them, and then you’ll have access to tons of help and free resources. I think there’s a bunch of free stuff just like this there. Maybe not the exact same one but I know a lot of free resources get shared on there too.
Did you buy every book for every year? Is this what’s recommended by AO? Sorry I’m new to AO and wanting to start with my kids next year.
I did aim to buy physical books for all the scheduled reads for my 3 kids so I could see what we are doing. I really like having book in hand and really dislike reading from a screen if I can avoid it. But it’s more expensive to own books, even at half price used. And books take space to store! A lot of people use LibriVox recordings (free to listen), the library, or use the cheaper kindle version to read. Most people seem to use some combo of physical book/audiobook. We are going to play around with audiobooks too, to help decrease my reading to the two younger kids. Thankfully my year 4 has now taken on all his own reads via books except Robinson Crusoe which has helped tremendously! I read everything else to the others at this point. AO isn’t opposed to audiobooks, but they recommend limiting too many audiobooks so that kids can (as soon as they are able) read the actual books to help with the visual aspect of seeing words for spelling, reading harder words etc. I see this as ideal, but in reality some kids just need to be read to longer and if the parent has a hard time fitting all the reads in audiobooks could be a huge help.
where did you find the artist journals? i cant find them
They should be listed on Masterbooks website if you use the search bar. Currently it’s their only art course I think!
Where did you get your book baskets from?
They are from target, but I am going to switch these out. I’ve noticed that the wire bottoms are starting to cause the books to get smallish dents/tears on the bottoms so I need something flat to hold them.
Thanks so much for this - I have tried joining the facebook group a few times, and they are specific about answering 3 questions but i am always only given 2 - and then my request is denied, do you know what I am doing wrong?
I am having the same issue. Have tried to join multiple times and always denied
Hmm, that’s odd. I’d try again, maybe on a diff browser? Or, possibly message the FB admin. Hope it works for you soon as it’s such a helpful page!
I was accepted after I made a forum profile! I am not sure if that was the missing piece but it lined up that way!@@LizBlueandHazel