Ambleside Online Year 1 Wrap Up

This is our 2nd year using Ambleside Online and it has been such a blessing to me personally and to our homeschool as well.  This was Zane's first "official" year using AO and my 2nd (and last!  Already?!?!) time going though Year 1.  In Ambleside the year don't necessarily line up with grade but if you start at the beginning they usually do.  So, Zane was 6 for most of the year (he turned 7 at the end of April) but he reads quite fluently for his (at least in my experience).  I feel like we had a great first year and he's ready for year 2! 

I do have one caveat if you're reading this and thinking about starting AO for the first time.  When you read what he did/does remember that he's the youngest of 4.  I feel that makes a big difference in some areas.  He's been listening to books way above his reading/comprehension level since he was born probably.  lol  He did get the shaft when it came to picture books for sure and I feel bad about that but he seems to be surviving.  :p 

We used Memoria Press for our phonics/read for him and once he finished it I just had him read to me every day out of good books at his level (not our AO books).  I didn't make him do most of the writing that MP assigns and we also didn't go over most of the questions, he would just narrate.  I simply chose to use MP because I had it already and didn't want to buy something new.  You really can modify most things to fit your needs. 

So, with MP, and after he finished, he read these books to me (I think there might have been a few others too but I'm blanking right now):
                                                   

He ended up LOVING the Billy Blaze books and has collected all of the re-printed one and read them and he also REALLY loved the Little Bear books.  It was a new story to him and it was sooo cute to listen to him as he discovered the story.  "Mom, who do you think it is??"  "Mom, what do you think is going to happen???"  Also, do you see that Cowboy Andy book?  It's one my mom picked up at a yard sale when my older brother was little.  It's a short chapter book written by Enda Walker Chandler and it's soo good!  Apparently there are multiple Cowboy Sam books (in the above book Andy is a "city boy" that goes to stay at Cowboy Sam's ranch) but it looks like they're rather hard to come by.  *sad face*  I did buy one on Facebook just yesterday so we're excited to get it!

His Billy and Blaze collection.

We didn't add on much "extra" work or busy work to his Ambleside readings.  When we first started reading Burgess' Bird Book I gave him the option of drawing the birds as we read...he did two birds and then stopped.  lol.  Oh well.  Ambleside has one chapter from this book scheduled every other week but I really wanted to read the whole book so we did a chapter every week for most of the year and we'll finish it over the summer.  Most chapters talk about two different birds so we would read about one bird one day and the second bird another day and he always narrated (told back) what we had read after we were done.  

When we first started the school year he was doing AMAZING at narrating and paying attention and seemed very engaged.  I would generally read an entire reading in one sitting and then have him narrate at the end.  As we neared the end of first term (so 12 weeks in) I noticed that he was complaining and whining a lot more about his work and his narrations had gotten significantly worse. 

So when I started planning Term 2 I split up his time with me even more.  We would do poetry and a short reading (Paddle or Aesop usually) and then he'd go do something else.  Later he would come back and we'd do another shorter reading (or even part of a reading) and then he'd do other things and even later he'd come back and read to me and we'd do his copywork together.  This arrangement seemed to help a lot with his attentiveness and the complaining (although don't think we didn't still have problems with them!  lol).

This is his copywork from November around the time I realized he might be picking up some bad habits and I needed to be doing it with him.  CM says they should be doing very little work but doing it "perfectly" so I backed off, started sitting with him while he did it (to ensure proper letter formation), and when he was done he would tell me what he thought he had done best and which letter he thought needed the most work and then he would usually write that letter a few times. 

Below is a passage he did over probably 3 days in April or May.

We took lots of nature walks, watched lots of birds, talked about a lot of fungus, and can even identify a decent amount of plants...but we did NOT do well at actually journaling things.   I'm hopefully that we'll do better this coming year. 

In addition to the Ambleside readings for Y1 we did several books together as a family (but I'll probably talk about those with the children they belonged to) and he also finished Saxon 1 and is a decent way into Saxon 2 (honestly I don't know that I would go with Saxon again but it's what we have and we're sticking with it), he and Grace listened to Song School Latin most days and went over Bible verses that they were memorizing for Bible Drill and AWANA.  In addition to this he did a little Spanish with the family and listened to Spanish books and songs. 

Below is an example of his weekly schedule.  During "rest time" he started out just listening to some of his longer free reads for the year (Peter Pan, Pinocchio, etc), around the middle of the year I started asking him to read 4 or so pages of a book like Billy and Blaze and then he could play quietly and listening to another audio book.  By the end of the year I've been requiring him to read a chapter in a beginner chapter book (he just finished The Bears on Hemlock Mountain and is reading The Matchlock Gun now) and then listen to something while he plays quietly for the rest of the time. 

I'm also going to add the YouTube videos of the passages he memorized this year as I get them up. 

(Side note, I'm doing these year in reviews mostly for my own benefit, to help me think through how the year went with each child, things that I need to do differently, etc.  I also hope maybe they'll be useful as a reference for others using AO.  I don't post them to brag about what we're doing or what we've read or anything like that.  I just like having a personal record that's easy to store and access!  lol)

Deep Thoughts from a 6 Year Old

"What does blunder mean?"

I was standing by the table one afternoon working on something while my 6 year old son was coloring.  He interrupted the quiet with this question.  Not thinking much about it I replied, somewhat absentmindedly,
"It's a mistake."  The quiet resumed but apparently his mind didn't stop.  A few minutes later he said, "Oh.  So the soldier made a mistake sending them into the mouth of hell."  At this I started to pay more attention to what he was saying (this particular child is known for talking non-stop and it's possible I have a bad habit of only half listening to him).  "Mouth of hell?"  What was he talking about?
"So the soldiers shouldn't have had to go to the mouth of hell?"  As he continued his line of questions it dawned on me that now, hours after the fact, he was thinking about the poem we'd be reading every morning.  The Charge of the Light Brigade paints a vivid picture of honor and duty as well as the consequences of a "mistake" and Zane was still pondering what it all meant even after we'd done ten thousand other things and even wrapped school up for the day.  These connections and conversations are stuff dreams are made up of for us home-schooling mamas.  To see even my youngest child grasping the feast set before him and forming a relationship with it almost feels like a whisper of encouragement to keep on keeping on from Heaven itself.  Sometimes the relationship is just a 6 year old understanding what happened in an historical poem, sometimes it is something like my 11 year old mentioning that the valley that made pilgrim's sleepy, that was part of the Evil Prince's realm, in Pilgrim's Progress, reminded her of the field of poppies in The Wizard of Oz that she has recently finished reading, and sometimes it's seeing a mossy snapping turtle at a nature center and my 9 year old saying, "Hey!  That's exactly what Minn looks like!"  However they're made I'm trying to store them up, write them down, remember them, and thank God for allowing me to take them on this journal of education which, as Charlotte Mason says, is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life.