Here we are at the end of another school year and the end of another stage in our homeschool journey. My son is completing AmblesideOnline Year 8 this week, and that means that next year he will enter high school and be in what Charlotte Mason called Form IV. Every new grade level and form comes with new challenges, and at the beginning of every year I feel woefully inadequate and unprepared for what is coming. Yet, at the end of the year, I look back and am amazed at what we managed to accomplish and how my children have grown into the new demands placed on them.
I wanted to take some time this week to review our experiences with AO’s Year 8, including what worked for us and what didn’t, what we changed and what we did according to the schedule. Even though Year 8 is not part of what is referred to in the AO world as the “salad bar” approach, it is one of the years in which parents have the option of choosing a “lite” version or the full version of the schedule. As such, there are some decisions to be made, and of course, every family will want to tailor the books and schedule to their own individual needs. So my hope with this post is to help anyone looking ahead to Year 8 by letting you see one example of how it could be done. Let’s dive in, shall we?
Full or “Lite”?
Let me start off by saying except for one major change in the area of science, I chose to stick with the full/detailed version of Year 8. My son is a good independent worker and a fast and confident reader, so long books and sizable page counts are not a problem for him. We did opt for audio books for some titles, mainly literature selections, but more about that as we go along. The big change we made in science was to opt for Nicole Williams’ Living Science Study Guides instead of using AO’s science selections. Again, I will go into more detail about that later. Now on to the nitty-gritty details….
NOTE: The book titles mentioned in this post are part of the AmblesideOnline curriculum, which is under copyright of AmblesideOnline.org. The information in this post is intended for educational purposes only. Be aware that AO’s curriculum and resources are revised from time to time. Please be sure to check the AO website for the most up-to-date versions of their curriculum, booklists, and schedules.
Bible and Spiritual Formation
As noted in my Year 4 Recap post, I wanted to stick with the old Bible reading schedule that we had been using since starting AO, so this year my son read Judges, Ruth, I-II Samuel, I Kings, Ecclesiastes, and Matthew, as well as portions of the Psalms and Proverbs. He also read Jungle Pilot by Russel T. Hitt and The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis. I read The Pursuit of Holiness by Jerry Bridges aloud to him because the copy we acquired had a lot of distracting underlining and highlighting that was distracting to him, and this allowed us to discuss the concepts presented in the book more thoroughly. I don’t really have any criticism or things I would change about this subject area except that I did have a hard time getting my son to spread his Bible reading out throughout the week instead of lumping several into one day’s work. That has nothing to do with the curriculum, though, and is just something we have to keep working on together.
History and Historical Biographies
Even though my son really struggled with Winston Churchill’s dense writing style last year, we still decided to go ahead with The New World as our history spine. In order to help make things more manageable, I split up the readings into 4 sections for each week so that he didn’t feel like he had to read a full chapter in one sitting. This turned out to be a good choice, and by the end of the year, J was no longer needing to space out the readings in this way and still had good comprehension of the text.
For biographies and more focussed history study, J read the following books on his own: The Voyage of the Armada: The Spanish Story by David Howarth, and Mourt’s Relation: Journal of the English Plantation at Plymouth. We combined reading aloud and independently reading The Life of Dr. John Donne by Izaac Walton and A Coffin for King Charles/A King Condemned by C. V. Wedgwood. These were somewhat detailed and challenging books, so taking turns having me read parts and J reading others helped his comprehension without bogging down the schedule with too many long readings. I initially meant for us to read the play A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt together (it is about the life of Thomas More), but we ended up opting to watch the screenplay instead. It saved us time at the beginning of the year when we were still sorting out our routines, while still giving my son an interest in More as a person. (He actually said he was the historical character he most enjoyed learning about this year!)
Literature and Poetry
This is the area in which we made the most use of audio books and read alouds. We also opted to watch the play Everyman rather than read it, which was so helpful in understanding this rather archaic work. The two main literature books for this year are Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley and The Betrothed/I Promesi Sposi by Alessandro Manzoni. J read most of Westward Ho! on his own after we changed libraries and no longer had access to an audio version of it. This book was not his favorite, but he didn’t hate it, either. We are still working our way slowly through this Audible version of The Betrothed. He really did not like this book for a long time, but I think now that we are over halfway through things are starting to improve a little. It is sort of like watching a train wreck in slow motion for quite a lot of the story, and that was hard to get through. (Disclaimer: the modern translation I linked above does contain some use of “d***” and taking the Lord’s name in vain, just for information in case you are considering that version.) I do wonder if there will ever be slightly more popular/less difficult literature selections made for Year 8 because I know quite a few families struggle with these two titles and many end up skipping them and opting for something else. I do think these are worthwhile books, certainly, but they are not as enjoyable selections as the AO literature books in the earlier years.
J also used an audio version of The Holy War by John Bunyan. I had started reading it aloud, but the passages were long enough that we would have gotten quite behind schedule had I continued. We didn’t have access to a hard copy of this book, so it was either e-book, which is not great for comprehension, or audio, which works better for us.
Thankfully, the year started out strong in the poetry department with Fierce Wars and Faithful Loves by Roy Maynard, which is an annotated version of Book 1 of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. I read this one aloud during morning time, and we all really liked it. I would definitely read more books of The Faerie Queene in future, even if I didn’t have the helps offered by Maynard’s annotations. I didn’t read all the annotations aloud, either, just the ones where I knew we needed clarification on a symbol or reference. I don’t think J connected very much with either Donne’s or Milton’s poetry selections in Terms 2 and 3, but that’s ok. He did enjoy reading Suzanne Rhodes’ poetry guide The Roar on the Other Side and frequently opted to do one of the suggested writing activities for his written narrations. I try not to push the poetry button too hard because I know teenage boys are not naturally drawn to it these days. Exposure to many different poets over the years is all I aim for, not forcing my kids to write a lot of it or learn all the technical mechanics of it until or unless they want to later on.
Of course, we read and listened to three Shakespeare plays together this year, as we always do. Somehow we ended up with two comedies (The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew) and one tragedy (Cymbeline), so next year we will have to work a history play back into the schedule.
Language Arts
This year we continued doing copywork and dictation, allowing J to choose his own passages for copying from whatever books he wished. I did download a resource with a list of passages from old Year 8 books, possibly something someone linked on the AO Forums, but I’m not sure where I found it now. It was an easy go-to for him when he didn’t want to copy from an actual book. I picked dictation passages in the same random way. I think this was our last year doing these practices. Next year I will likely give J a new copybook for him to use as a commonplace book or journal but not require him use it as a part of school. His spelling is good enough now that I am not really concerned with continuing dictation, either.
We did use the suggested grammar text by Nancy Wilson, Our Mother Tongue, usually once a week, but we didn’t complete all the chapters or exercises by the end of the year. I am undecided if we will continue using it or any grammar text next year or if we will switch our focus more to the mechanics of writing different types of papers in preparation for college.
To Be Continued…
This is already a very long, wordy post, and I am only about halfway through all the subjects I wanted to cover. So I think we will end here for this week, and I will come back again next week or the week after to finish up the rest. If you’ve read this far, thanks for hanging in there with me! I hope it has been helpful in some way! Until next time, happy homeschooling!
Kiel
