• Homeschooling - Uncategorized

    Recap of Our AmblesideOnline Year 4: The Second Time Through

    May 14, 2025 - By 

    As we wrap up our school year this month, I am looking back over the year and reflecting on progress made and things I might want to work on changing as I plan ahead for next year. My daughter is about to finish AmblesideOnline’s Year 4, and this is my second time guiding a student through this year in our homeschool. Before beginning to write, I scrolled through some of my old blog posts and realized that the last time I recorded anything about our AO year, it was a 4-part series about Year 4 as I was in the…

  • Homeschooling - Uncategorized

    To Homeschool Happier: A Little Recap and Refresh, Part 1

    February 23, 2021 - By 

    I’ve wanted to share how our homeschool year ended up, but it is hard to get it all out in words. The year 2020 was a very rough one in our homeschool, if I am to be perfectly honest. It was not just the stress of COVID, either. Yes, having less time out and about with friends and having much more limited access to places like the library and even, for a time, local parks and green spaces, definitely took their toll on us. But moving to a new state mid-year, during COVID, was probably the bigger stressor on our…

  • Homeschooling

    This Year in Our Home School: AmblesideOnline Year 4, Part 4

    March 27, 2020 - By 

    Welcome back to my series on AmblesideOnline Year 4 and how we are implementing the curriculum in our homeschool this year. In this final post I am going to write about how I have scheduled subjects and a little about how this works in our daily routine. Before I get any farther with that, however, I want to emphasize that currently our daily routine is quite fluid. Some days we get everything done more quickly than I expect. Other days are a slog. Many times we have to move things around to make room for outings, grocery runs or appointments.…

  • Homeschooling - Uncategorized

    This Year in Our Homeschool: AmblesideOnline Year 4, Part 2

    February 21, 2020 - By 

    Last week I shared some of our favorite books so far in Year 4 of AmblesideOnline. This year my son is in Form II of Charlotte Mason’s programs, and as such, there are a few changes and additions to the curriculum. AmblesideOnline gives some suggestions for these subjects, but there are not specifics given for dictation and grammar. Here is what we are doing that is new. New Subjects in Year 4 Shakespeare–Where in Form I we were only reading retellings of Shakespeare plays, this year we are reading full plays together. Instead of using the AO current rotation for…

  • Homeschooling - Uncategorized

    This Year in Our Homeschool: AmblesideOnline Year 4, Part 1

    February 14, 2020 - By 

    This year we are entering our fifth year of homeschooling and our fourth full year using AmblesideOnline as our curriculum. I realized as I looked back over my posts from last year that I never did write about AO Year 3, which is too bad because I really did love the books we read last year. It was a good, smooth year for the most part. But here we are in the middle of February, which for us means that we are finishing up Week 6 of Year 4. So I thought now would be a good time to talk…