Every year I’ve shared a detailed blog with all our homeschool curriculum resources, and today I’m happy to share our 2024-2025 plans for Year 4 (Form II) and Year 1 (Form IB).
You can find last year’s curriculum plans below:
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I’ve written several blog articles detailing my planning process in the past, and this year I shared an immense amount of details in the Yearly Homeschool Planning Blog Series that I hope you’ll find helpful for your planning. We begin a new homeschool year every July, so I start intentionally homeschool planning for a new year in January to give me plenty of time.
A Few Beginning Thoughts To Note:
I always need to leave a short disclaimer in planning posts to say this is only what I do for my family, and I am not saying this is the only way, or that these are the best resources fit for yours. I hope by sharing my homeschool planning and our curriculum resources that you will come away eager to plan rightly and well for the children you’ve been given, taking into account their personhoods.
While I hold to a more Charlotte Mason method of lessons and principles, I do not follow her application perfectly, and in wisdom, and discernment, I mix her educational methods and practices with my own.
Please feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions about the curriculum resources we’re using this year!
2024-2025 Curriculum Plans For Year 1
When you click on some of the subject headings, it will direct you to a list of most of the subject resources we’ll be using outside of Ambleside Online. To see the booklists for AO’s subjects, please visit Ambleside Online’s website.
History: While we’ll use Ambleside Online’s Year 1 reading schedule and books for our Ancient Europe topic in term 2, we’re focusing on Ancient Egypt for term 1, and Ancient Asia and Early North America for term 3.
Natural History: We’ll be following the journey of Paddle to The Sea in the Great Lakes! I’m so glad I get to read this story again followed by some map work using a free Great Lakes printable map I searched on Google!
Copywork: Folks on the Ambleside Online Facebook page are always generously sharing copywork pages, so I didn’t feel the need to buy a copywork book. We will use some from the FB page I found for Year 1, as well as some I’ll put together from handwritingworksheets.com. If my Year 1 progresses enough in his handwriting skills, I’ll have him copy a passage or sentence straight from one of our readings as I’ve done with my oldest.
Math: Right Start math has been working well for my oldest so we’re going to try Book B with my year 1 this year. We are also going to pair it with CM Arithmetic Book 1 because I’ve liked how simple and efficient the lessons are in it without extra busy work. I’ve been using CM Arithmetic Book 1 this year so it’d be great to finish it in Year 1! If we continue to like it, I’ll purchase Book 2.
Reading Lessons: We’ve been working through Prenda Treasure Hunt reading, a free reading program you can download online so I plan to continue using that to build stronger reading by sight and sound skills. We will continue building words with our wooden letters, and do some of the reading by sight and sound methods from this previous blog post. He’ll use the Primer Book from Free and Treadwell for reading practice, but other books we’ll include are Little Bear, Frog, and Toad, and readers we’ve collected over the years from Goodwill.
We are not in a rush to learn to read, but as my youngest continues to build his reading fluency, I will introduce a word book to him, as I did with my oldest. You can read more about how I approached a Charlotte Mason method of reading with my oldest in this blog article, which includes an example of our “word book”.
Personal Timeline: Once a month he’ll add a drawing and/or word entry to his personal timeline throughout the year. I did this with my oldest and it’s one of the sweetest keepsakes we have from her Year 1!
2024-2025 Curriculum Plans For Year 4
When you click on some of the subject headings, it will direct you to a list of most of the subject resources we’ll be using outside of Ambleside Online. To see the booklists for AO’s subjects, please visit Ambleside Online’s website.
History: My oldest will keep moving through our history cycle reading about the late 1600s up to the American Revolution. As I’ve shared in this previous blog article, I didn’t see a need to shift the Ambleside Online Year 4 history reading schedule around as I did for Year 1. I’m not even substituting any history books other than removing Trial and Triumph. However, I wanted to bring in more narratives, stories, and biographies from the late 1600s up to the American Revolution, so that’s what we’ll do.
I’ve decided to split Abigail Adams reading throughout the entire year as recommended by some from the AO Forum.
I appreciate that AO added stories from Answering the Cry to Freedom to widen their history narrative, and alongside those selections, I’ve chosen a few more biographies that we’re eager to include in our year!
Natural History: We’re looking forward to reading another Holling book, and will stick to AO’s reading schedule for Minn of the Mississippi alongside map work from the free Seterra app and a free printable map I found in a Google search to follow along with the story.
Literature: I decided to make room for some other literature readings I wanted on our schedule, so we won’t be reading Robinson Crusoe or Kidnapped this year as recommended on the AO Year 4 schedule. We’ll focus primarily on Age of Fable (as I think that’ll be a challenging read in and of itself as it is for us) for terms 1-3. We’ll read some of the recommended Free Reads for Year 4 in replace of term 2’s literature readings and some in term 3, but we’ll still include The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Paul Revere’s Ride as recommended.
Citizenship: Because this is our first time with Plutarch, we are going to read through Anne White’s Plutarch Primer book and discuss Publicola for term 1, and then I will decide if we’ll continue with AO’s Plutarch rotation, doing one each term or split another one between terms 2 and 3 to lighten the load.
Math: We’re continuing with Right Start and will move into Level D midway through the Fall after we wrap up Level C. My daughter also has enjoyed using the free Anton, Khan Academy, and IXL Math apps for math drills, so we will continue to include them in our weekly math practice along with our math games in the evenings and on weekends.
Copywork: Because we’re adding dictation and grammar into our language arts loop for Year 4, the only daily copywork she’ll have is to do an entry in her Truth, Beauty, Goodness notebook every day. She has the choice to add a passage, scripture, or lyrics from our Bible, literature readings, memory work, recitations, poetry, hymn lyrics, or folk song lyrics. The point of her copywork at this age is just to build upon her writing style/penmanship, and form the habit of writing down beautiful Truth, words, and ideas.
Grammar: I’m hopeful we will like using Fit It Grammar Book 1 this year as everyone I’ve asked who’s used it seems to have nothing but positive things to say about the curriculum. We also like using The Giggle Guide to Grammar occasionally and The Illustrated Grammar books from Usborne (Now Paper Pie).
Spelling: We’ll be using a handful of resources, but Spelling Wisdom by Simply Charlotte Mason will continue to be the main resource. If you’d like to see some of the other language arts resources we’ll have in our Language Arts Loop this year, you can check out more here.
History Timeline: This is the first year we will introduce a Book of Centuries with my oldest! We’re using the free BOC template from Simply Charlotte Mason. I’ll encourage her to add entries as often as we read history books but only require 1-2 entries a week.
Latin: Another new subject in the feast, we’ll be using Prima Latina from Memorial Press for this year’s foreign language studies. We’ll also continue practicing Spanish using YouTube, and Song School Spanish 1 with my youngest.
Typing: Typing.com has been a great free resource for this subject so we’ll continue using it. I set up a teacher and student account and my daughter can track her progress as she moves through the lessons.
Coding: This is another new subject to our feast, and one that my husband is excited to see in our plans. He’s an engineer and has seen the importance this skill brings in many fields of work, including his. We’re going to start with coding.org and see how we like it.
Logic/Critical Thinking: We love all the logic games we play together in the week, and this year we’re going to add something a little more formal with the Critical Thinking Detective Beginning Book and Mind Benders.
2024-2025 Family Studies
Morning Collective: For almost all our morning collective subjects (Bible, Poetry, Songs, Recitations, Artist Study, and Composer Study) we will follow Ambleside Online’s rotations for Year 1 and Year 4. Part of our Bible time will also include Exploring the Bible Reading Plan for Kids by David Murray for my oldest and we’ll also read the Parables of Jesus from Lithos Kids.
Special Studies: Upon request, my children want to study the human anatomy and dinosaurs this year, so I decided to go with it! Our human anatomy study will be guided by Delightfully Feasting’s Anatomy guide, which we will use for the entire school year rather than the 12 weeks. Some of the books we’ll be using include books by Simon Seymour such as The Human Body, The Brain, and Eyes and Ears. We also will read parts of The Way We Work, and use A Human Body Coloring book we thrifted for diagrams and our science journals. For our dinosaurs study, we will go through Ken Ham’s Dinosaurs for Kids book, along with Legends and Lore of Dinosaurs by Master Books. Our Dinosaur study will only last one term, and then we will move into ponds, and rivers to pair with our geography family studies topic for term 2. For our final term, I’m still deciding if we will follow AO’s nature study rotation or choose something else.
Shakespeare: I’m looking forward to introducing my youngest to Shakespeare for the first time, and this subject seemed perfect to add to our family studies! We will follow Ambleside Online’s Year 1 schedule for Shakespeare readings, and use our favorite Shakespeare version by Nesbit paired with our favorite Shakespeare puppets by RachelKiwiDesigns to help us along with narrations.
Vocabulary: We’ll learn a new word a week with 365 Words for Clever Kids and our challenge will be to use the new word throughout the week!
History: Year 1’s Ancient History will be included in our family studies this year! As mentioned above, we’ll use Ambleside Online’s Year 1 reading schedule and books for our Ancient Europe topic in term 2, we’re focusing on Ancient Egypt for term 1, and Ancient Asia and Early North America for term 3.
Geography: Our geography topics for the year will include Earth’s land (term 1), bodies of water (term 2), and US geography/learning the 50 states (term 3). For term 1, we will focus on land, including the earth’s layers, volcanoes, earthquakes, mountains, hills, and valleys. You can find several Geography resources we will use this year here. I’ll be sure to share more of our Geography throughout the year!
Piano: This is just for fun at the moment, and our kids are really loving Hoffman Academy on YouTube for learning simple songs on their Keyboard Pianos.
Family Read Aloud: With great excitement, we will begin to read The Hobbit together for our family read aloud. We have the illustrated version by Jemima Catlin and it’s just lovely! I haven’t read the book either so this one is truly for the whole family!
Literature: Our literature for the year includes parts of AO Year 1’s literature booklist, along with:
Our homeschool plans for this coming year look much different than what we’ve done the last few years, but I am hopeful it will all work out for the best! I’m very much looking forward to having my youngest student join us in more subjects and I pray that in all of it, my children can taste the goodness of a wide living education.
Love all of your plans! You sharing has helped me in my own journey…just curious will the book of centuries replace your timeline you’ve already started?
Thank you! Yes, it will replace our history timeline in the schedule!
It looks like you’re using SOTW for history. I supplemented year 1 AO with SOTW because they were both good options. It didn’t even occur to me to divide by regions. Good idea.
Yes, I think we are going to really enjoy SOTW this year along with other living books. I’m looking forward to breaking up our history lessons by different regions for a broader view of history in that time period.