Practical Tips for Planning Ambleside Online
Before you read further, I want to note that the purpose of this post is to share how I plan our Ambleside curriculum but not implementation of all the moving parts of Ambleside. I’ll follow up in other blog posts.
We’re almost finished with Term 2 of Year 4 with Ambleside online. We’ve been using Ambleside since my daughter was in year 1 and I can honestly say, the scheduling gets easier the longer you spend on the curriculum.
Despite my feeling secure in scheduling, I have felt overwhelmed by looking at the schedule and booklist. I’ve also made plenty of mistakes when it comes to Ambleside. This has helped me formulate a method that helps me plan out our year with a little more ease.
Ambleside Online is broken into three areas: Weekly readings, daily work, and weekly work.
-Break everything into groups: Looking at the weekly Ambleside schedule can feel daunting. There are a lot of books to work through and when you apply short lessons, you can find yourself feeling pressed for time. I break our readings into groups by color. All of our history readings are grouped together; science, loop, morning time, and Ambleside readings. This helps me schedule things out for the week.
-Plan your readings for your specific blocks: Once I’ve grouped our readings, I fit them into the schedule based on the blocks of time that we have during the day. Science readings are planned during science time, history readings during the history block, and Ambleside readings are scheduled during our Ambleside block. Some books we use audio books and I assign my daughter independent readings. It helps me to plan the same readings for the same day. We always read The Storybook of Science on Monday and Wednesday during Science. Abigail Adams Biography is read on Wednesday and we end our history week with This Country of Ours. Having the structure of the week helps me know that we will get to all our readings during the week without bogging things down too much.
-Group your weekly activities that coordinate well together: For the sake of planning, I group artist study, composer study, and architecture study together on Thursday afternoon during our afternoon tea. This helps me check off items on our list without fitting them into the school day. I found last year, when we were pressed for time, I would cut our beauty subjects out of the day.
-Utilize Morning Time: While hymns and folksongs are weekly work in Ambleside, we do them daily during morning time with our assigned poet, a devotional, recitation, devotional, and foreign language recitations. This helps me meet our exam requirements during the term and check off a couple of readings for the day.
-Have a loop schedule: One block of time during our day is devoted to a loop schedule. I have 4 assignments that fit into this block of time, Geography, map drills, Plutarch, and Shakespeare. Ideally, we would accomplish every single subject every single week, but it doesn’t often work that way.
1: Geography
2: Plutarch
3: Map Drills
4: Shakespeare
Instead of scheduling things on a particular day I loop through our subjects, picking up where we left off. If we miss a Shakespeare lesson one day, we just pick it up the next and continue through our loop. This type of routine required me to take the pressure off myself to keep to a particular schedule. In time I’ve learned that everything gets done each term.
-All other weekly work is paired with a particular reading: This year, N is doing one weekly written narration based on a book she chooses. She does oral narrations for every reading. Our history timeline is paired with one of our history readings, and we pair science note-booking with a science activity during the week. We complete things like copy work, dictation, and grammar during our Language Arts block.
-Use Rest Time: My son takes a rest time every day. During this time of day my daughter works on her handicraft (if she’s proficient at it), does 20 minutes of reading from her free reading list, practices piano, listens to a Spanish podcast (usually while doing handicraft), and has a drawing lesson. She then has time in the day to do with as she wishes. Usually she plays outside, does something creative, or works on a science experiment.
During our first year of Ambleside online, I tried to plan a little bit of reading from every book, every day. After a term of trying to maintain this schedule, I felt exhausted and couldn’t understand how everyone managed such a rigorous schedule. It turns out, I was making things incredibly difficult for myself. Since adapting and adjusting the way I schedule our days, Ambleside has become much more manageable and enjoyable for us.
