5 Mistakes I Made During Ambleside Online Year 1
In August of 2019, I gathered my stack of books, wrote out my schedule, and took the first day of school picture. We were ready to begin our first true year of homeschooling, with the exception of preschool!
Two years later, I’m able to reflect back on our first year of of our homeschool and see some of the mistakes I made and how they impacted our homeschool during that year.
I would also like to note that no curriculum is perfect and almost all require adaptations to work for a family. We appreciate the booklist, schedule, and affordability of Ambleside Online but we have had to make specific adjustments to books to better fit the needs of our homeschool and our family culture.
Mistake 1: I began Ambleside too early. Charlotte Mason recommends that formal lessons don’t begin until age 6. We began formal lessons a couple months before my daughter turned 6. While she rose to the occasion, the first year was particularly tough in pressing forward when it would have been easier to back off the program and enjoy our year more. What starting early has given us is freedom to take a gap year at some point, but in hindsight, doing a true kindergarten year would have served us better at the time.
Mistake 2: I had an incomplete understanding of Charlotte Mason. Ambleside Online is a curriculum used within the Charlotte Mason Method. While I had read synopsis, quotes, blog posts, and listened to podcasts about Charlotte Mason, I had not gone back to the source. This led to me feeling frustrated when I didn’t understand the why behind particular aspects of the education. Now that I have read through the volumes I feel more able to handle the program with a fuller appreciation for why we do what we do. If you choose a method to homeschool under, I recommend reading the original sources that inspired the method.
Mistake 3: I didn’t pre-read the books related to our curriculum. While this isn’t necessary to completing any curriculum, having an understanding of what we’re reading helps me to know how our narrations are going and plan extra activities along the way. It also allowed me to see any books that may have content I was not ready to approach with my child. In the same breath, I held too tightly to books that weren’t considered “living: for our family. There have been a couple books that we have substituted because they weren’t connecting after giving them an honest shot. I now know it is ok to appreciate a book but substitute something else when it isn’t working.
Mistake 4: I created a completely unobtainable schedule that ended up stressing me out. Our readings were too long and I made no grace for myself to actually accomplish our work in a joyful way. This made it difficult to not finish readings and almost impossible to catch up when we fell behind. Looking back, I think pre-reading the books would have helped me better plan the schedule better.
Mistake 5: When I felt overwhelmed I cut the “extras” from our day. Good-bye artist study, composer study, poetry tea time. Good-bye map work, focused handicrafts, and extra nature journaling. While I understand that the beauty subjects isn’t the core of the Ambleside, the do make up some wonderful aspects and connections to the books. Cutting these didn’t help me get ahead and they made our days less fulfilling. Today, we keep our beauty schedule interwoven in our days to give us a break and refocus our energy.
Our first true year of homeschooling happened with so many outside influences: we brought home a newborn a week before our school year began, finalized an adoption process, and managed the beginning of a global pandemic. All of those impacted how we homeschooled that first year.
Making mistakes is natural with anything and I’m thankful for the opportunity to learn and grow from them as we continue to homeschool. I’m also thankful for the do-over we’ll have with another homeschooler when he comes up in age. Remind me to read this post again in 4 years, will you?
