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 3.5 How I plan Our Charlotte Mason History Lessons: Read Here!
For Part 4 Lesson Planning, And Timetables: Read Here!
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Finding Curriculum, and Resources
Now that I have a list of subjects I want to pursue for the upcoming homeschool year, I begin to look for curriculum, books, and other resources for each subject. The first place I look is in the back of my homeschool planner where I keep my “future curriculum considerations/planning” section. In this section, I’ve taken notes and jotted down curricula or books throughout the previous year that I may want to consider for the new year.
I’m usually always thinking about the next homeschool year or years to come, so having a quick go-to place for me to write down any ideas or resources for future years is helpful for me to stay intentional with my time, and also gives me a catch-all place from the entire year before. I keep it in my homeschool planner because I use it every day, and therefore it’s accessible to add those quick notes when I come across something in an email, on curricula sites, or on social media.
The process of choosing curriculum in my yearly homeschool planning gets a little easier each year because I’m (mostly) familiar with the curriculum out there, and at this point, we aren’t making too many major changes as far as learning style, methods, or spine curriculum so I’m not doing too much initial curriculum searching.
When I first started homeschooling, I would usually start with Google and search something like “Charlotte Mason homeschool curriculum”, and several options would pop up. Now that we’re four+ years into our homeschooling experience, we’re more settled in our decisions of curriculum, and am grateful that I’m not feeling like I am starting from scratch every new homeschool year.
Print and Review Ambleside Online Schedules
To be honest, I foresee this step always being part of this phase of my planning because I genuinely think Ambleside Online is a rich CM foundation, and at the very least, it is a springboard for our homeschool, despite substitutes or additions I might make. Some other free booklists I look at are from Beautiful Feet Books, Stories of Color, Simply Charlotte Mason, and books shared in the Charlotte Mason social media communities.
Making It Our Own
Once I print off the upcoming year’s schedules from Ambleside Online’s website, I determine what we’ll keep on the schedule. This is fairly easy to do because almost all of their books recommended are free online somewhere. If not, I request them from my local library.
It’s not uncommon for me to substitute books from the given schedule. I do this to better fit my family and our educational philosophy, and family values. I think here, truly, is where the treasure hunt for living books, and a living education begins!
One subject we’re making more of our own is history. While I’m planning to follow along similarly with Ambleside Online’s history rotation for both Year 1 and Year 4, I’ve decided to sub out a few books and bring in some other books that will hopefully allow for a wider narrative of the history period we’re studying. I haven’t finalized our booklist yet, but here is a snapshot I took of some of the books we’re including in our year. I still have a few more I’m waiting on through snail mail! (For reference, we will be studying Ancient history and the late 1600s up to the American Revolution)
Other subjects we are making our own and including in our homeschool year for family studies are Anatomy and a special study on Dinosaurs. These are just a couple of interests of my children, and I thought this year, as we now have two students in formal lessons, would be a great time to bring these into the schedule.
We will be following along with Delightfully Feasting’s Anatomy special studies, along with some favorite living books we own which you can see a picture of below. The DF Anatomy curriculum is 12 weeks, but I think we will extend this into a study we do all year.
Though we will continue with AO’s nature study rotation for 2024/2025, our special study on dinosaurs is something both my kids have asked to learn more about and I am adding it as a stream of our nature studies. I found a few books we’ll read together, videos, and even a book on legends and lore of dragons and dinosaurs from Master Books that I think we will all find fascinating! If I try really hard, I can probably convince myself that this goes along with our ancient studies 😉 Science of Relations, my friends!
Honestly, we’re just having fun spreading a wide feast, even beyond the common Charlotte Mason topics. As I look at our plans shaping form, I am very thankful for this homeschool life! Stay tuned for the full curriculum choices blog article at the end of this series once I have finalized all our resources and schedule!
Living Books and The Treasure Hunt
When I know for sure what topics we’re going to study for each term, or which books to substitute, I begin the treasure hunt for living books at my local library, pulling up their website and searching the available books to check out. For example, since we’ll be studying earth science for geography this year, I’m searching for books on mountains, plains, canyons, volcanoes, etc. We’re also revisiting the 50 states for Year 1 again, so I’m finding books for that. This process took me a handful of weeks to get the books in, but once I was able to get the books and resources in my hands, I sifted through them quickly and narrowed them down to our final choices.
Because we homeschool using living books and follow Charlotte Mason’s methods (not perfectly, and with our own twist), we usually have more than one book per subject that we read in a term, and it’s not uncommon that we use only parts of a book.
YouTube Read Alouds and Second Hand Books
If my library does not have a book, I can sometimes find a read aloud version on YouTube, which gives me a good look at the inside of a book. If it’s a good read aloud, I will opt to just have us sit and enjoy a YouTube read aloud version of a book in our schedule (This is a personal and financial preference for our family. We don’t own every book we use in our homeschool, and sometimes YouTube and the library are my best options).
If I decide we need to own a copy of a book, I use my booklist page from the Homeschool Curriculum Planner and write down the title, and what it costs full price (usually I’m looking at Amazon pricing). Then, when I go to second hand stores or use Thriftbooks.com, I use this sheet to check and buy what I need for our homeschool if I can find it used. Keeping a list of books I’m looking for on my phone or a picture of my booklist is something I don’t leave home without when I know I’m hitting up a thrift store or book sale.
What’s Next?
Once I have found the books and resources we need for each subject (I’m very close!), I’ll start to put it into our schedule divided up into 3 12-week terms. At this time I’m choosing our recitation pieces for the year, finding maps to print and video resources to use in certain subjects. I’m also thinking about a preliminary timetable for all our subjects in a week. I’ll be purchasing other curricula for things such as math, Latin, and grammar.
There’s nothing quite like still moving along in our final term of 2023-2024 homeschool while planning for 2024-2025 homeschool and seeing it in one long strand of a harmonious living education full of Truth, beauty, and goodness.
The final part of this Yearly Homeschool Planning series will conclude with our full curriculum choices list (linked as much as possible), and bits of how I’ll schedule it all out in a week’s timetable. If there are other things you’d like to see in the final part of this planning series, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment below and let me know! And if you’re reading this past March of 2024, I’m happy to answer any further planning questions you may have.
This is great! How do you decide your schedule or figure out what term the books should go into? Any guidelines you follow for that?
Thank you so much for sharing the tip of starting with your own library resources. I’m based overseas but still have access to my library card and digital titles. It seems daunting initially to sort through library titles. Honestly, combing through curriculums and other lists only to still have to look up what is available via the library is loads of work too.