Welcome to my homeschool channel! I'm Liz, a stay at home mom of 4 kids. We have a 2nd grader, 1st grader, preschooler, and newborn. I share homeschool curriculum reviews, flip throughs, and our homeschool journey! I'm finding we are more eclectic homeschoolers, pulling resources from many different styles and curriculums. Get notified of new videos by subscribing and say hello in the comments!
O awesome! Year 5 is off to a much better start than year 4, which was our 1st ever with AO. I think it takes a year to just learn this way of homeschooling through books and narrations!
Yes, the problem is that there are some inaccurate pieces of info being an older book, especially on the chapter of mushrooms and venom. There’s a great google doc someone created with all the corrections in one spot. I’d just print that out and go over it with your child, or cross out the incorrect info and replace it with the correct info (listed in the google doc). Here’s the Storybook of Science corrections google doc I found for reference; docs.google.com/document/d/1AE-ye_by2xTRWx0SbNyuLvyUsD70ol57R2lNBMNAoas/mobilebasic
We do ENWC with our home ed group and I love the idea of doing a flower press book 🌺❤️ I'm going to try adding that to our outings. I also got a fun learning resources book to store our home ed memories as we meet up with our friends in a different location each week to play and learn together. Hope you guys have an amazing year. Xx
I like the home ed memories book idea! A friend of mine does that. She bought a huge planner that has extra space for pictures and they just print them on their printer.
Love your videos on this curriculum! I have been looking into Math With Confidence for my now grade 2 kids. I have noticed that it stops with grade 4. What do you plan on using after that? Thanks! 😊
Kate Snow is planning to create up to level 6! A new level has been released each June so June 2025 year 5 should be available. After year 6 I’m not sure where to go, but I think there will be lots of recommendations by then!
Yes! Of all the things we've tried, that has worked the best and we'll lean into that more. I'd love to hear how other families have managed toddlers while homeschooling. Lots of patience.
I’m definitely going to look for the Grammar Land book, that sounds fun. I’m amazed how you can fit all those different subjects into your school day! Really impressive.
I think your kids would think Grammar Land is fun and silly! Also, we def don’t get to each subject each day! We just do a few reads daily, and the schedule seems to have 1 or sometimes 2 chapters a week of lots of these books. A slow drip, but lots of them at once. Hope you guys have a great year! What are y’all using? I’m amazed how you travel and homeschool.
Thanks so much for your videos! We're just a few years behind your family (my oldest is in 3rd grade). We're using AO for the first time this year and your videos have been a huge blessing as I figure everything out. We use and love Math Mammoth. Maria Miller (the author) posts videos that go with most lessons on the MM website. My son enjoys them - might be worth checking out.
Thanks for letting me know they’ve been helpful! Be sure to reach out if you want to see a future video on something too. Also, SO glad to hear you like Math Mammoth! I’ll look into her free videos, we haven’t used them yet as most of this is still review for him from 4th but I bet we’d use them as new material shows up. I am already so thankful we found this new math! My son can read the instructions and examples pretty well and if I have to step in to help, I’m also able to figure it out, unlike the Singapore Primary 2022 we were using.
My kids love the Grammar-Land book!!! They have been enjoying meeting the personalities of the different parts of speech. My kids are in 5th and 6th grade.
O yay glad to hear another good review of it! I think it’s so funny to read, and was thinking we’d go slowly…maybe a chapter a month. Hope you have a great start to 5th and 6th grade!
I really enjoyed this video, thanks! We are using AO too but we went with the groups option which uses forms rather than individual years. I’m not sure what we’ll do when we have children aged in two different forms, as I love doing our readings together. Potentially I will just run two forms at the same time, removing some books from each to lighten the load. We’ll see 😊
I just wanted to comment back on your post and let you know that I found some thing that is much easier for you to use and not harmful to your plastic If you would go to Walmart or Joannes and buy you a bottle of Dritz sewing machine oil. I am a long arm quilter and I use pan graphs and I use a dry race marker to mark the patterns and such on my Plastic the dryer race after being on here for a while if I don’t get back to finishing that quilt that day or the next is extremely hard to get off and I have tried everything that I know except for buying the chemical stuff that they make so I thought I would just try this Sewing Machine oil And it works perfectly. It all came off like brand new and this oil you can put a drop on your finger and smear it all over the numbers and then take a piece of cloth that it wipes right off clean as can be and if you have any issues with it might be poisoning or anything like that of course, you wanna keep it out of the reach of children and that sort of thing but you could also take a clean wipe and wipe them off for any residue that may be left over. Hope this helps you saves some &
These end of the year videos are my absolute favorite type of homeschool videos to watch! I think its totally normal not to get through a curriculum in its entirety. I've been curious about AO. I've been following your videos on it. Thanks for sharing.
Simply put, yes. I spend more time and energy with my 1st grader than 3rd grader. Level 3 felt much less manipulative heavy than level k, 1, or 2. We didn’t have to use the 10 frame and set pieces on it for my 3rd grader like I was doing with my 1st grader. We didn’t have to set out and visualize place value using blocks and rods, because she understands that well now. So we saved time in those ways in later levels because the basics are down. However, there’s still some kind of activity daily, included in the 1st page of the student workbook. I found the visuals are so good on the page that we didn’t have to use hands on pieces much at all saving lots of time. Also, 2 of the 3 pages in their daily workbook were independent work/review. I’m hoping level 4 continues to launch them a bit while keeping the easy teaching style we all love!
Im just always torn as well. Like isn’t it super important to let the kids have free time? At what age are they supposed to just hunker down and read more books?
I agree free time is so needed, even in later elementary school. I also see a tendency for inefficiency and dilly-dallying which can extend a 3 hour day to much, much longer. Also, transitions and interruptions add lots of time so it’s tricky to know how much time is actually spent doing school sometimes. 🫠
Are you planning on using Ambleside again this next year? Do you do dictation and copywork from the books? (Full Charlotte Mason language arts style?) I did Ambleside last year but then worried about my children’s writing and went to TGTB this summer but am missing all the reading! Though it does seem like a lot. I’m thinking of picking read alouds from Ambleside next year… 🤔
We will be doing it again! Not sure if you saw my end of the year wrap of video but I think I talk about some changes we’ll be doing next year using AO. We did do copywork from the books they were reading, as well as from the assigned poems/Bible verses in each year. I just printed off someone’s free pdf file from the Facebook group for year 3 and 4 and kids copied from that and eventually also from their books. For dictation, we did this via All About Spelling level 2 with my 4th grader. They have dictation sentences in there where he practices writing the new spellings, so we counted that as dictation though didn’t get to dictation each week. More like 2-3 times a month. 👌🏻 Your plan sounds good, or, you could do a less traditional Charlotte Mason year using lots of AO books (with or without narration) and a less Charlotte Mason style language arts using something else for that. Whatever you’re desiring is fine!
This is off topic but have you seen the beta version of The Children’s Tradition? I have often considered A.O but then I get overwhelmed but when I heard Amanda speak about the above curriculum and it sounded like a great alternative. I appreciate your review. *Bathroom art! 😂 I love this so much. Not to derail you but Queen Homeschool has such great science programs that involve nature in a simple and beautiful way.
I couldn't find anything on the beta version of The Children's Tradition when I googled it. Is it a new Charlotte Mason curriculum? Thanks for the science recommendation!
Thank you because my kids just came today. I have like a giant kid so I was like wait. Why do I have it if I don’t know how to do it and it was so so simple thank you because now you showed me how to make them
Yes, that is what they recommend. I did see a blog post online of someone who made a system to combine kids into one box, but it made my head spin a bit. The extra box keeps it as simple as possible.
With a non reader, recitation can look a little more like "repeat after me" while memorizing a bible verse or poem until they can say it on their own from memory. The purpose of recitation isn't memorization but rather speaking clearly and often memorization just happens since you stay with the same piece for a while. You can do this with something short, or work on something longer over the year! To be honest, I didn't do recitation this year with my year 1. We dropped the ball there and will begin with him in year 2. We did do it with my older kids and I can see the value in it!
