'Day in the Life' of our Homeschool

 8:20- All the kids are at the breakfast table finishing up so I bring over my laptop and we watch https://worldwatch.news

8:30- Folk Song (Follow the Drinking Gourd) at the organ 

8:40- I read Our Island Story Chapter 3 with Avery, who is doing Y1, with a side of helping Malachi with a copywork/grammar worksheet. Avery narrates the chapter as we go, we stop every few paragraphs or so for him to narrate. Then I get Avery started doing a handwriting book, lowercase letters c and o. When he's done with that I log him into his free trial of Explode the Code for some reading and spelling practice. Not sure exactly what the other kids did during this time...math and reading practice maybe.

9:17 - I'm reading the Bible with Malachi and he narrates it to me (everything but poetry gets narrated so I'll stop listing the narration each time), and then a poem with Avery.

9:38 - 'This Country of Ours' (American history) with Malachi, Tobias is working on a grammar worksheet and needs a little help.

9:50- Tobias is practicing piano, Malachi is listening to Children of the New Forest (historical fiction about the English Civil War) on Librivox audiobook.

10:34 - I read 'Kim' to Tobias (it's part of last year's readings and we're finishing it up slowly); then he does Duolingo Spanish.

10:44 - Malachi is on the piano. Tobias has read a chapter from 'Story of the World', some of Luke in the New Testament, and part of The Chestry Oak (historical fiction that goes with his WW2 studies in history).

10:51 - Finish up the 'This Country of Ours' chapter with Malachi

11:04- Read 'Ninja Chicks' for fun with Malachi and Avery

11:10- Read a William Blake poem, Eternity, with Malachi.

11:15- Tobias reads me a poem (Rainsongs by Dunbar). This is technically not the right poet for this year but we're finishing up one from last year and I'm not sure I've downloaded this year's poet to the Kindle yet. There's a snack in there somewhere.

11:18 - Tobias reads Genesis 11

We all drive to pick up school lunches and do curbside document signing for a mortgage refinance. I forget my ID (Nate was driving). The kids watch Peep and the Big Wide World in Spanish (.75 speed for better understanding!) while I run back to the title company with my ID.

Did some things happen for a shorter time than they should have? Yes. We're easing in and building independence. Looks like we'll have to get to Nature Study later this week or afternoon.

Bedtime reading will be from Farmer Boy.

Our Homeschool Day Using Ambleside Online

In my last post I talked about the planning I do for our school year. How does that actually become a week or day of school?

Each weekend I take a look at the week ahead and place activities in our weekly schedule. Some weeks if we are traveling or busy, I just check things off our main pdf schedule in the binder, but most weeks I create a schedule. I copy my own spreadsheet from last week, delete the things that we did, and fill it in for the week. This allows me to work around other activities; for example if we have co-op classes Friday morning I don't schedule anything for that day except maybe a drawing lesson in the afternoon. This year we don't have any outside activities on the horizon so it doesn't matter so much which day is which, though I'll probably keep Fridays a little lighter.

In the schedule picture below, at the end of the week I'd go into that spreadsheet and delete all the 'AO Read' lines (unless there was something unfinished I'd leave that in) and replace it with the next week's stuff. All the stuff like Nature Study, Typing etc. remains the same.

There's no set or right way to do this, everyone's schedules that I've looked at look different. Since these schedules are for our family, they may contain all sorts of crazy abbreviations like 'CoNewF' is for the book Children of the New Forest.

While we almost always start our day singing at the organ (or now we've also started to incorporate a current events video and I'm not certain if that will end up being a lunch activity or a start the day activity), the order of the activities for the day is flexible from there and not specifically bound to how it is listed in the schedule.

On each day I set out a colored marker. In the pictured schedule I must have put blue out on Monday. Either the kids or I check things off as we do them. It looks like we sneaked in a handicrafts on Monday, but didn't get a Nature Study done. But at least those handrails are clean!

After we start the day together, I work with youngest kid one and one first and the other two are supposed to work on anything they can achieve by themselves. For example, in the schedule above Malachi could be working on his math, copywork, reading, piano practice, or chores while I was not available to help him. He could also possibly read or listen to Exodus 12, and then 'narrate' (tell it back, talk to me about it) as soon as I was available. When it's his turn for my help, I would read Bard of Avon with him. Similarly, Tobias (6th grade) works on math, free reading, Duolingo Spanish, typing practice, chores, copywork independently and reading some of his other books.

While the plan is to work with youngest, middle, then oldest, the reality is that I keep an eye on all of them and they can politely interrupt their brothers' time with me in order to quickly ask a question or do a narration. I love that they do their math on the computer because I can hear the little noises in the background when they get a question right or wrong so I know without stopping my other work that they're at least still doing something.

We are only a few weeks into this school year, and that included a road trip already, so I'm not sure yet how all the timing will go! So far we've been able to get everyone finished with their main items before lunch, though sometimes there is a chore or instrument practice or Nature Study or handicraft left for an afternoon activity.

How I Plan our Ambleside Online Homeschool Year

Ambleside Online is a free curriculum that has plans available online. The work is not done online unless you choose to use online resources like a computerized math curriculum or audiobooks.

We have been using it for 5+ years and really love it, however I know that the website was overwhelming to me at first, so I wanted to give a quick explanation of how our family uses it to plan our year.

1. The 'grade levels' of Ambleside are written as 'Year 1', 'Year 2' etc. Year 1 is great for 6-7 year olds. People jumping in at an older grade sometimes go down a 'year' or two, that's OK because you don't need to do all 12 years to be able to graduate or be college ready. My kids are in Year 1, 3, and 6. I go to each of those parts of the website (for example, https://www.amblesideonline.org/01bks.shtml) and print off the pdf schedule of the year (https://www.amblesideonline.org/charts/Y1_36wk_chart.pdf). There are 3 'terms' of 12 weeks each, which end up on 6 papers for each kid/grade. These charts contain the specific readings from each book to do in a week (they can be spread or scheduled over the week however it works), as well as a list of other subjects to do daily and weekly. I hole punch these and put them in a separate binder for each kid; I splurge on the nice binders with the flexible rings that can be laid open nicely.

2. Buy a new or used copy, borrow, library, Kindle (lots are free!) or find Librivox.org audiobooks of the listed books. Some books are used over multiple years so are definitely worth buying. I have found our total expenses for books are pretty reasonable. Abebooks.com is the first place I look for used books. Library sales or garage sales are another great place to find books from the earlier grades. Living Book Press is another great resource, they reprint older books, and their editions are very nice, often they're even customized for Ambleside Online by putting the stories in the order of the AO schedule.


3. Then I prepare things that I need for other subjects.

• Each kid gets a math curriculum. We're currently using Miquon Math workbooks and Khan Academy (online and free), though I've also used online Beast Academy in the past, which is online but not free.
  
• For copywork, we just use notebooks for the older kids, Avery is using Handwriting without Tears 'Letters and Numbers for Me' book. 
• Reading/Phonics for Y1 we've used 'Teach your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons' as well as http://www.progressivephonics.com, which is a free online resource with printable booklets.
  
• For Picture/Artist Study I usually download 3 packets (1 per term of the school year) from A Humble Place blog and get them printed at Office Depot. You can also purchase packets already printed from Simply Charlotte Mason or Riverbend Press. Ambleside provides a list or rotation of who to study each term: https://www.amblesideonline.org/ArtSch.shtml but we have made substitutions based on what is available, aka borrowing ones from friends that they've used in the past. I just keep a list on my computer of who we have studied which year so I can look back on it later.
  
• We learn a folk song and a hymn for each month. Sometimes we follow the ones suggested by Ambleside (https://www.amblesideonline.org/Hymns.shtml) and sometimes we make substitutions.
  

4. I buy normal school supplies like pens, pencils, notebooks, erasers, highlighters. I also make sure everyone has a nice watercolor set for nature study and/or colored pencils or watercolor colored pencils, and a good notebook for nature study, we like the Canson Mix Media spiral bound books. Sticky Post-it flags are my other must-have school supply, sometimes I use them for bookmarks (carefully, do not use on fragile paper or very special books).

If you are thinking of doing Ambleside Online and this looks overwhelming, you do NOT have to start doing all those things at once. We usually don't. You could start with just half a week's readings spread over one week, daily math, and learning a folk song. Then the next week you could do the other half of the readings and you could add in your copywork every day. Then the next week you could add in a picture study (takes 10 minutes once you're prepped with either printed or computer art to look at). That gives you time to figure out the lingo and your kids time to adjust. But hopefully I'll cover more of the how-to-do-it in a later post!