In this blog series, I’m sharing my process of planning out our 2024-2025 homeschool year for 4th and 1st grade. This series will take a few months to complete while I write these articles in real-time as I’m planning so that I can get into as much detail as possible. I hope this series gives you ideas and tips for your own homeschool planning, and that you’ll keep coming back to read more as we move along in the series! As always, I’m happy to further answer questions in the comments!
For Part 1 Overview Planning: Read Here!
For Part 2 Subject Lists and Subject Scheduling: Read Here!
For Part 3 Curriculum, And My Hunt For Living Books: Read Here!
For Part 4 Lesson Planning and Timetables: Read Here!
For Our Charlotte Mason Curriculum Plans For 2024-2025: Year 4 and Year 1: Read Here!
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When I first started homeschooling, I didn’t know where to begin looking for resources and curriculum, and to be honest, curating our homeschool curriculum myself was far from my mind. Fast forward 4 years into our homeschool adventures, and here I am, planning and curating our lessons for 2024-2025 with way more confidence in my role as a mother-teacher.
It wasn’t until this last year that I started reading Charlotte Mason’s volumes, grasping a better understanding of her educational philosophy, and thinking about my own educational philosophy. I realized how life-giving it could be to apply her principles in a way that fits my family. I realized I didn’t have to allow it to be the master, but a guide in curating my children’s living education, all while taking into consideration their God-given personhoods.
So when I began planning for Year 1 and Year 4 this year, I knew I’d be entering into a new world of planning by creating and curating parts of our schedule without using a curriculum. I’ve noticed the need to do this for a while, but fear kept feeding me lies that I wasn’t qualified to do so.
Thankfully, I haven’t had to do this on my own, and I’ve been given lots of equipping tools and encouragement to go for it! I’ve had a handful of wonderful mentors, influencers, and wise homeschool moms share how they do it, who whole-heartedly invest themselves into helping other homeschool moms feel equipped to take on this intentional, and hard but worthy work.
I will share a small list of those I have gained from in this season at the bottom of this blog post, but certainly, there are so many more to name, feel free to leave their blog links, or social media handles in the comments if you know more who create their own curricula for homeschooling!
I should also put it out there that I am not completely curriculum-free over here! I still appreciate the curricula we chose and consider our spine, if you will for this year. I don’t believe you have to be all or nothing. That’s the freedom and beauty of a home education, right? I am immensely grateful to have the opportunity to craft a living education fit for my family where necessary AND use curricula already prepared that align with my educational principles and methods.
I don’t know who needs to hear this but…
Using curriculum is not a sign of weakness, or choosing a “less-than” education. Curriculum, all curriculum, should be used with discernment always considering the child and their personhood first and foremost. The same goes for not using a curriculum, or not using a curriculum in its entirety. You are not giving your child a watered-down version of the curriculum or education if you choose to substitute books or remove something from the schedule altogether. We must stop communicating that it has to be one or the other. Let the mothers educate with the freedom given to them without such condemnation for their decisions.
So today, I am happy to share how I plan our Charlotte Mason History Lessons as part of the Yearly Homeschool Planning series!
If you’ve been around my blog for some time, you know that I’ve been using and am continuing to use Ambleside Online. I am still using their history rotation this year for Year 1 and Year 4 (Ancient history and the late 1600s up to the American Revolution). However, I will be adding some other resources per term to bring a wider narrative to our topic.
Year 1 History
In Year 1, instead of focusing predominately on Ancient Europe, I decided to only have us study Ancient Europe for one term, which then allowed me two extra terms to bring in Ancient Egypt, and Ancient Asia. This will include ancient tales, biographies, and stories during the historical period and location at hand. Because we are American homeschoolers, I also find it very important to include early American history. I am happy to share our resources below for you if you’re looking for something to use. Our early American history resources date further back before Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, so those biographies (scheduled for AOY1) are going to be postponed and give me room in the schedule for other early American resources.
Early American Resources
- Beneath Earth & Sky: Legends of Native American Sacred Places by Joseph Bruchac
- Native American Stories for Kids: 12 Traditional Stories from Indigenous Tribes across North America
by Tom Pecore Weso - Turtle Island: The Story of North America’s First People by Eldon Yellowhorn and Kathy Lowinger
As for Ambleside Online Year 1‘s history books, I’m still including 50 Famous Stories in term 2 when we do Ancient Europe/Mediterranean region. I am currently looking at a couple other living books (you can see some I am considering in this booklist here) that will be better suited for our Ancient Europe term. I didn’t introduce Trial and Triumph into Year 1 with my first, and we won’t be introducing it this year with my second child either. This will give me more room on the schedule for additional resources, which I will share in a later blog article in the Fall of 2024. I’m mentioning this to clarify that while we primarily use Ambleside Online for various subjects and topics, when I incorporate additional resources, it’s likely because I’m substituting them into the original schedule.
Year 4 History
With Ambleside Online’s Year 4 history, I didn’t see a need to shift the reading schedule around as much as I did for Year 1. I’m not even substituting any history books other than removing Trial and Triumph. However, for our home education, I wanted to bring in more narratives, stories, and biographies from the late 1600s up to the American Revolution.
Because of my own lack of history knowledge, I was feeling a little uncertain about what or how to find high quality, living books about this historical time period. I needed to find a reliable, trustworthy resource for finding living books, especially on the subject of history. Thanks to the world of social media homeschool moms, I discovered Stories of Color where that’s exactly their purpose online and in their own homeschools. I am forever grateful to these amazing homeschool moms who do the hard work and share it with other homeschool moms.
So, while I know we won’t get to cover every person or event in our history lessons, I do feel a bit more prepared in choosing better books for my specific family, and I am even more excited to learn history I never did alongside them.
How I Determine And Schedule Our History Plans (and how I work our substitute books into our schedule)
If you’ve already read Part 3 of the Yearly Homeschool Planning series, you’ll already know that my first step is to print off the Ambleside Online schedules for the correlating years we’ll be doing. Ambleside Online, even with our history and other substitutions, is still one of our “spine curricula” for this school year.
For this year, I’ve decided to remove the book selections of Natural History in Year 4 from our schedule since we are doing Nature Study and Science-related topics together as a family and the selections in Year 4 were not the right fit for us. We will continue with Minn of the Mississippi for Y4 and Paddle for Year 1, but we’ll choose other resources for Geography and Science/Nature Study for our family studies.
We have also decided Robinson Crusoe will be our family’s audiobook during a big family road trip we have planned in the Fall, so that will be removed from our schedule.
By slightly adjusting the AOY4 schedule (with 7 books being removed in our schedule), I found it allowed us to include additional living books suitable for our homeschool without overwhelming our plates on top of a full AO curriculum (which would have been too much).
Scheduling History Topics by Term
Although we aren’t using all the books in AO’s history selections, we mostly follow along with Ambleside Online’s history rotation. Once I know the historical time period we’re studying for the year, I like to break up the year into 3 terms with topics within its period. I typically do this on one of the “ideas” planning pages from the Homeschool Curriculum Planner, but to see it more clearly, I’ve typed it up as an example below. You can also see the same schedule planning for our geography subject (but as my chicken-scratch brainstorming version).
Living Books
Once I have the time period, and history topics chosen, I move into choosing living books. I do not have a history spine, but rather, we read from a various selection of living books on our topics. Even if we choose a book that is considered a spine, we don’t usually use it as such. For example, I will be reading parts of The Story Of The World Volume 1: Ancient Times, but most of our other readings for the year will come from living books that tell us more details about specific people, places, and events in ancient times.
Depending on how long a chapter is, we are usually only reading a chapter a week, paired with a picture living book, or a YouTube resource. I don’t do “unit studies” for our history, but instead make sure to have enough engaging, high quality, beautifully written narratives that give us ideas rather than plain facts.
If you’d like to see the books I’ve selected for our Ancient Egypt history studies, you can find that here! If you’d like to see the books I’ve selected for Year 4’s Early American History, you can see them here!
I hope this blog article helped clarify some of the practical side of my planning from Part 3! Please leave a comment if you’d like to discuss more or have other questions! 😊
Inspiring homeschool moms and their resources who curate their own curriculum (in part or whole) and/or resources that helped me be better equipped in curating my curriculum and schedule:
- Heather at @wholeheartedhomemaking and her blog which you can find here!
- Crystin at @delightfullyfeasting
- Delightfully Feasting’s Workshop for “The Art & Craft of Educational Philosophy”
- Delightfully Feasting’s Workshop for “Principles Over Practices”
- Lisa at @amblingtogether and her blog which you can find here! She uses Ambleside Online, and shares incredible AO planning tips, and AO guides for free!
- Brittany at @feasting.in.the.mountains (also A-Tailor Made Feast)
- A Tailor Made Feast history guides I purchased the 5 Timeline of Topics Bundle with 5 History Cycles and it has been a helpful resource in choosing topics for our history plans, and something I can refer to each year as we move through history!
This has been so fascinating to me. Thank you so much for sharing your plans in great detail. I’ve gone back and forth between them several times now. I can’t wait to see the final history post. (Perhaps there will be a literature one too?) I’m very much a planner. I have dreamed of using Ambleside Online so color me gobsmacked when the prospect of using alternatives appeared for me. It had not dawned on me that they have no Egyptian, etc. history included in the curriculum, rather it is mentioned in passing in some texts.
So you blog posts have also shown me its ok to deviated from The Plans. 🙂 And this is coming from a former school teacher! Of course I have not idea what my child’s needs will be until they come along, but I’ll be ready. It has be wondering what other things to look out for as well. I’m just starting to comb through the curriculum and read the texts myself.
I have started both Charlotte’s first volume as well as Parables of Nature. Im really enjoying the Parables. I’ll be reading Trial and Triumph next. I noticed you are not including it. Perhaps I will not include as much of it as AO does. It will be interesting to see what it is like!
Amanda I have been searching hi and low for someone who laid out their Year 1 history like this AND was using AO as a spine! This makes so much sense for my brain! Can I ask are you using Viking Tales or Our Island Story for Term 2 of Year 1?
We will be using 50 Famous Stories and Our Island Story in Term 2 for Year 1 but I am not sure yet if we’ll be aligned with AO’s reading schedule for them. I decided to opt out of Viking Tales this year, but may have some of it as a Summer read for 2025.