As I prepare for another homeschool year, I’ll be using Ambleside Online (AO) as our primary curriculum. For the 2025-2026 school year, I will have a student in Ambleside Online Year 5 (AOY5) and another in Ambleside Online Year 2 (AOY2).
If you’ve followed my blog before, you know I like to dive into details, and this post will be no exception, so grab your favorite drink and stay awhile! ☕️☺️
I want to share how I plan our year with Ambleside Online. While I’m grateful for Ambleside Online’s free and easily accessible schedules and booklists, I still feel responsible for putting the work in myself. That looks like thoughtfully and intentionally considering each book with discernment and wisdom, understanding each of my children’s needs and personhood, and freely making the curriculum our own while remembering my philosophy of education.
To see Ambleside Online’s full yearly schedules and booklists by year, please visit their website.
If you’re just starting with Ambleside Online, you might find these articles helpful:
First Things First
Well, I do two things first. I print out the schedules from Ambleside Online that I will be doing with my children, and then I print out my Homeschool Curriculum Planner and Year-In-A-Glance calendars.
Next, before I even begin diving into the schedules, I take some time to do an intentional review of the previous homeschool year. This step has really helped me slow down and think through areas of growth, reflections, and areas to improve for myself and my children. If there was a certain subject I just completely dropped the ball with or habits I notice need adjusting, I bullet-point it all right here. I spend a similar amount of time pondering and making bullet points about the vision for our new homeschool year. I love to share these thoughts with my husband, and oftentimes, we add some additional thoughts together.
(For my children’s privacy and respect, I’ve blurred my writing here)
Calendar Overview
I’ve written a more detailed blog article about how I create my year-in-a-glance calendar, how I choose breaks, and even more details about vision casting and goal setting. Check it out here!
Subject Planning
Over the last year, I’ve moved this phase of my planning from paper (using the “Subject Planning List” and “Subject Scheduling” pages from the Curriculum Homeschool Planner) to Google Sheets. If you’d like to see how I used those sheets previously, here’s another blog article showing examples of how I used them!
I start my subject planning with a list of the subjects I plan to cover in the year. I separate my two students’ subject lists in my Google Sheet and also have a section for “Family Studies” of subjects we will cover together.
Next, I simply duplicate that Google Sheet to represent the three twelve-week terms we will spread over our year. My brain has to see it spread out by term, and by child, rather than all combined.
Choosing The Books
From here, I begin evaluating Ambleside Online’s books from their schedules and plugging in the books for each student as I go. I do this alongside the footnotes found towards the bottom of each year on Ambleside Online’s booklist pages. *I highly recommend anyone using AO to look through the footnotes for each year, as there are often available additional resources, disclosures, and advice given in them, book by book.
If there is a book I am not sure about, I make my way to the AO forum, the AO FB page, or other blogs that share more specifics on the AO books I need more information on. I just google “Ambleside Online Year XYZ, Book XZY” and usually have places to check out. This year, I even branched out on my Instagram with a Q + A box about a specific geography book and received several great recommendations and advice. I saved the answers in my “Year 2 (take two)” highlight on Instagram if you’re curious about it.
When I am sure about a book, I go ahead and copy and paste the book pages/chapters from AO’s schedules directly into my customized sheet. At the same time, I add any book I’m going to use or strongly considering to my “booklist page” from the Curriculum Homeschool Planner.
I take my booklist with me when I’m thrifting to help me remember what I’m looking for, and several times I have come across books we need this way.
At this time, I am also picking curriculum that Ambleside Online either doesn’t offer or that I want to use somewhere else, such as math, foreign language, typing, and others.
Lesson Planning, Subject Timetable, & Pre-Reading
I’ve gone into more detail about my subject timetable (including sharing my 2024-2025 template), and lesson planning in this blog article from last year.
The process isn’t much different this year, although we aren’t doing as many subjects together as I planned for last year. This is mainly because, after a couple of terms, I decided to keep my kids in separate history cycles due to their age/level gap. My oldest is also mostly independent in the majority of her subjects now, so that means I can spend one-on-one time reading aloud with my youngest as I did with my oldest during year 2, which I’m grateful for.
I am in the middle of lesson planning, researching resources, and pre-reading as this blog article releases (March 2025). I have shared some snippets of my pre-reading already on my Instagram stories, and it may not surprise you by this point that I also wrote a blog article about how I’ve gone about pre-reading in the past. Check it out here!
I love these blank pre-reading notes and intend to keep them in my planner for easy reference during narrations.
Closing Thoughts & Considerations
Pre-reading, and many of these planning steps I’ve shared, is optional and not required to do Ambleside Online. You can easily print, gather the books, and start using Ambleside Online’s schedules as-is and provide a rich, Charlotte Mason education to your children.
I enjoy the planning process of homeschooling, and this is just what has worked well for me. Each year looks different, even after using Ambleside Online for years.
As I begin each new homeschool year, I do so with a renewed perspective, recognizing that what works today may not be the best fit in the future. That said, one thing I am certain of is that Ambleside Online has been an irreplaceable resource in our homeschool journey, providing a rich feast of living ideas, a stable foundation to build upon, and a springboard for continued growth in our Charlotte Mason-inspired education.
Want to talk about homeschool planning or Ambleside Online? Feel free to leave a comment!
Coming Soon On The Blog
Our full 2025-2026 curriculum plans for Year 5 and Year 2…Stay tuned!
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