Planning Post

Well we have finally made it to the planning post! For those of you not familiar with Ambleside, I suggest you head to their website to familiarize yourself with the layout, and structure. As I mentioned before, it is free to use. I also recommended joining the Facebook group, and the forum. Both are available to anyone who is using Ambleside Online for your main homeschool curriculum.

I started by printing off the book lists for my daughter, who will be in Y2. I also, have a daughter in Y0. She will be enjoying a rich variety of books this year, while working on her letter recognition. She will join us for music and artist study. I have taken pictures of the books we will be reading for history, geography, literature, and the free reads my daughter selected. We may change those up, these books I had on hand already!

I ordered most of my books from Amazon, or Thriftbooks. I just made a list of the books, and created a spreadsheet of which site had the books on sale, or used for the best price. This year my oldest daughter did Masterbooks Math for a Living Education. We will continue with that program for second grade as well.

I also ran to my local dollar section store and got some little notebooks for nature study, and some watercolor paper. Besides the books, there is very little that needs to be purchased. I have not bought all the books, I created some Yoto cards, and found some as audiobooks on Spotify. The website has links to Project Gutenberg, which offers free e-books for a majority of the literature listed.

I will admit, at first I looked at this stack of books, and I felt very intimidated. However, when you look at the weekly schedule AO offers, their breakdown for the book list is weekly. It is up to me as a parent to decide will this be a four day homeschool week, or a five day homeschool week? The past two years, I did school Monday - Thursday's and took Friday as a break day. I homeschool pretty much year round with a break in the fall, and around Christmas time, and in July. I always aim to kick off the new school year in August.

I am hoping and praying that this year will be similar, however I will have to make allowances since I will have two students now, and not just one! I should say, I will have to give myself grace because I am used to a very different schedule with homeschool, this is so saturated in literature, which I love! I may enjoy the change, but my daughter may find it challenging because she won't do as much book work, but more oral narrations with me.

Despite all these new, and exciting changes I am excited to see what God has in store for my family. I hope you found this post helpful! I want a hub for other AO families to come and be able to process things the same way I am needing to.

Best Wishes,

Danielle

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