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Thanks for watching! I like wrap up videos from others as well. Then I know they’ve had time to use something and critique it!

It was Map testing via Homeschool Boss. If you google that it should pop up.

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!

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. 🫠

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!

Thank you for teaching me ❤

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!

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!

@@LizBlueandHazel that makes perfect sense! Thank you!

You’re welcome!

Thanks for this idea.

You got this! I think your kindergartener is going to be clutch in terms of helping entertain your 2 year old. Hold on to that nap time as long as you can, and combine as much as you can for the 7 & 9 year old. Hope you have a really great year!

We are still using and loving Math With Confidence with my younger 2 kids. One child will start MWC4 in the fall. I've got a MWC playlist with updated reviews using it here: czcams.com/play/PLMuWXzAg6JiJXoMydBnzx6E9V79jadEjj.html . MWC has provided a solid mental math base and plenty of practice with each concept. It picks up a bit in 3rd grade too. MWC is slower and less challenging than Singapore but that's ok for me. It's also super conceptual and hands on like Singapore, but much easier to implement for a non mathy mom and there are more simple games. We're actually switching my oldest from Singapore to Math Mammoth for his 5th grade year because Singapore Primary 2022 became a daily fight. I struggled to use the Home Instructor's Guide, and it wasn't set up well for him to be more independent which he wanted. Hope that helps!

​@LizBlueandHazel super helpful!! Thank you! Glad to hear you are all still loving it and it's working well. I'm not a mathy mom either and MWC has been so easy for me to teach and easy for my daughter to learn. I think I just let that ease make me feel like it wasn't enough. Your reviews have been immensely helpful though and have given me the confidence to trust MWC and stick with it. Thanks again!

Thanks for the encouragement!

It's typically been early afternoon when my 3 year old is napping, so the house is a bit more quiet. Sometimes it looks more like two chunks of time rather than all at once.

@@LizBlueandHazel I’m having a hard time with it! None of my kids want to read. We do a 30 minute read time and they all whine about it 😪 probably I need to cut out TV time completely or at least most days because I’m thinking that would help.

Awesome you're trying something new and adjusting too! I'll check out Sabbath Mood, thanks. Appreciate the insight!

So glad it was helpful! We are utilizing the book baskets for each level again this year. I think you’ll love the simplicity of the 36 week schedule printable for each grade, just cross out books you don’t use. We did all our reading together before AO too, and I miss aspects of it, so I’m looking at what books I want to read together this year. We pulled a few from some of their 36 week schedules to do family style last year and I liked it, so we may do that again especially with literature picks. Just an idea if you end up missing the family style feel.

We’re jumping in with a 3rd and 5th year. Your review of your year has helped me to rethink how we’ll begin in the fall. I think we may do Bible and history together, maybe even starting out with George Washington’s world. I like the layout of AO but I also like to add in our own way of doing things. And as Ive looked for honest reviews of AO on CZcams, yours is by far my favorite. Thanks for all your hard work!!

This is actually before we started AO, but we still use something very similar to this! I'd be happy to do an updated video of our daily lists for each grade. The main difference is that they now each have around 3 daily scheduled reads from AO plus narrations, and our history is no longer together. We use some audiobooks to help make AO more independent. We still start the morning similarly around 9 with family bible/hymn/1 poem/1 chapter of a read aloud. And each child still has copywork, math, and silent reading time. I'm figuring out how to switch some things up using Ambleside Online to fit our family, and how to get my oldest 2 more independent.

@LizBlueandHazel thank you! I've been loving following you and your journey with AO. (And homeschool in general). You're a few years ahead of me (I have a 6 yo, 3 yo, and 1 yr old), so I'm just gleaning so much from you! Do you have any rhyme or reason to how you're breaking up the weekly readings each day? I'm probably over thinking it, but I'm detail oriented and there's so many different readings that I feel like my brain needs some kind of system to know which readings I need to do which days. Planning it makes my head spin lol 🤪

We broke up the readings by picking about 3/day per kid. I’d see how many reading chunks there were on the schedule that week and divide it up by 5 days. My year 4 ended up having more like 4/day, and my year 1 had about 2 per day. I’d just pick out the books and lay them out in front of their bin. Some of the page assignments for a book are too long to read in a sitting so I’d spit it up into two chunks instead of 1. We wouldn’t move on to the next week’s readings until all of them were crossed off the schedule as complete.

Thanks for sharing your experience and your plans! From what people have mentioned over and over, it seems AO only gets "easier" to implement once there are independent kids (not including enrichments), which we're on the cusp of... but not there yet. I think Simply Charlotte Mason sounds wonderful for keeping everyone in the same history cycle while still giving the bigger kids extra reads. Hope ya'll love it and have a great year!

Glad it was helpful!

This year my intention was to mix them, and I have a video on how they seem compatible (by using them for a day of copywork, a day of dictation, gentle grammar etc). In reality I found it very hard to fit in anything else with such a full schedule with 3 kids using AO. I still think we may be able to try it if I can get our days smoothed out and my two bigs doing more on their own in other subjects. We ended up just finishing one dart, and I talked about this more in my last video sharing ‘how the year went using Ambleside Online’. My ideas for this year, to use with AO 4th and 5th grade, is to try Fix It Grammar while also decreasing our AO book load a bit. I’ve heard it’s a tiny amount of time daily and they’ll learn grammar basics. One day of the month in a dart uses reverse editing (or finding the mistakes) similar to a day of Fix It Grammar. I still have about 4 arrows and darts I own that I’d love to get to, so if I can use some as family read aloud then I think we could continue to try to do a few, alternating with Fix It Grammar. Maybe every other month or something. We will see what works!

Thanks for sharing! We are coming from a very structured LA program without a lot of joy, so we are going to try Dart, but I’ve seen a lot of videos where people leave BW after a year or two, so I thought I would see if you had any complaints.