AmblesideOnline Year 2 - a recap of our second official Charlotte Mason homeschool year
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It’s January 2026 here in South Africa and we have just begun our schooling year. This year my middle child, Aaron (about to turn 7), has officially joined his older sister in the school room to begin Year 1, while Everly is now beginning Year 3. It’s been quite an adjustment planning a school year with 2 kids doing their own official Ambleside years, but we are excited. While last year is still relatively fresh in my mind, I wanted to write a recap on how our AmblesideOnline Year 2 went. I’m hoping I can also use these posts to refer back to when my younger children reach these years.
AmblesideOnline is a free homeschool curriculum that uses Charlotte Mason's classically-based principles to prepare children for a life of rich relationships with everything around them: God, humanity, and the natural world.
I think every homeschooling mom will say that their planning/scheduling is always a work in progress, but I will share how I planned and recorded our school year here too. While I am continually trying to refine my systems, I am always happy to share the whats and hows. For this year, I went with a very simple approach (because I kept getting sucked down the many rabbit holes filled with wonderful ways to plan/schedule until I realised all of that was glorified procrastination!). I simply printed out the year’s schedule & booklists off the AmblesideOnline website, collected the books (second hand book shops & whatsapp groups, some on Loot & Amazon.co.za and an online thrift book store I found; Chapter1, were where I found most of my books…as well as a few family ‘book mules’ who visited from the UK and were able to bring over some of the harder to find books).
Once I had the schedule’s printed, I took out my trusty little a6 sized notebook, and manually added in the books and subjects needed to be covered that week. I did this on a Sunday evening and it only ever took me about to 10 minutes to do and really helped make the Monday school mornings run a little more smoothly.
This was my first year solely homeschooling my own kids, as the previous year I had closed up my Reggio inspired farm school, The Red Shed; which I had run alongside homeschooling my older kids. I ran that for 2 years, and loved it so much! But as my eldest got older and her workload increased, I just wasn’t able to cope with the varying needs of other children as well as my own. As sad as I was to close, I am re-opening again this year (2026!) because I have found myself a wonderful young teacher who will be able to keep things going with the other kids, and whom mine will join as soon as they are done with their homeschool lessons with me.
For the 2025 year I had the following aged kiddies:
Everly - 7 year old starting Year 2/Grade 2 (in South Africa we use Grades, but Ambleside follows ‘Year’ terminology. So please don’t get confused when you see Grade/Year…I am using them interchangeably).
Aaron - 6 Year old starting Grade R (or Grade 0 as it used to be called…I don’t know what this relates to but perhaps AO Year 0 haha)
Mason - 3 year old (preschool/kindergarten)
My main focus was on Everly (AO Year 2) this year, but all 3 kids joined me in the early morning (usually in bed with mugs of tea!) before breakfast for Morning Time. I tried to do this at least 3 times a week, but sometimes only managed it once (or not at all if I was really needing my own alone time!) but this consisted of hymns/folk songs, poetry, devotional (Indescribable by Louie Giglio) Bible stories (we are slowly making our way through The Biggest Story Bible by Kevin deYoung), sometimes if I had enough time before breakfast I threw in some Elementary Geography (Charlotte Mason) and a couple of read alouds we had going on (Coral Island by R.M. Ballantyne, Little House on the Prairie and The Adventures of MillyMollyMandy were the 3 books we alternated with depending on what we all felt like on that day).
Aaron joined in for 2 - 3 days of school in the week, mainly for reading & maths (click here for my approach to reading which I’ve followed with Everly and now Aaron…I do still plan on writing a full post on this but for now the mentioned link covers what I did…just scroll down to the bit about Reading/Phonics). Mason came and went sporadically, and every now again I would sit and do some stories (or Letterland books with him) but mostly I was with Everly and we did school 3 - 4 mornings a week (most weeks it just ended up being 3 mornings). The afternoons were free play with one afternoon a week for our sport/extra curricular activities in a neighbouring town. There were/are no sports/extra mural options in my little town, and so we have to travel far and wide for these. Because of the distance, my kids do what is offered on that one day and the rest of the week is for a lot of outdoor/farm life and play.
Here is a basic overview of AmblesideOnline Year 2 (please go onto the Ambleside website itself for ALL the information you will ever need about this FREE and absolutely wonderful Charlotte Mason based curriculum). AO (aka AmblesideOnline) has exceeded all my expectations so far, even though it is free (don’t let the fact that it is free make you feel it isn’t robust enough to hold it’s own against anything else). You will need to have a basic understanding of the Charlotte Mason philosophy (I am still making my way through her Volumes to truly understand her methods myself) but the Advisory team who put together AmblesideOnline have really done something incredible and I can’t sing their praises highly enough.
Here is how the year went, as well as the substitutions I made from a South African perspective, and I’ll share what didn’t work/what we just didn’t get to as well:
Reading/Phonics:
Everly was a very strong reader at this point and so I gave her a couple of her own school books to read to herself. I chose the ‘easier’ or rather the books I thought she might really enjoy like Robin Hood for this. She then had to narrate to me, outloud afterwards, in preparation for Year 3 when I would need her to take on more of her own school books. She did not enjoy this (haha it’s so much more exciting being read to than having to read to yourself and then narrate what you know you know, out loud, so I understand the resistance!) but it was a very good growing season for her.
I still had her read aloud each school day, and this would sometimes be from the Moore Mcguffey Second Reader, or it would be from one of her designated school books. After reading the McGuffey lesson/story, I would ask her the questions at the end of each story, and then she would simply read through the word list. I didn’t do anything else with those words in terms of spelling etc.
Even though she is a strong reader, I still had her read aloud each day so I could check in on her pronunciation/ensure she wasn’t skim/skip reading as I’ve noticed she tends to do when a story gets boring (I cant blame her, I do the same!).
Handwriting/Copywork:
This was an area where I didn’t think I needed to be concerned until towards the end of the year when it was brought to my attention that Everly’s spacing was very far off in terms of ‘grade appropriateness’ (or whatever grade average ever actually means). But, I tried not to take the feedback too personally, and set about making this a priority. I realized although her letter formation itself was very good, she had only ever done her copywork in books with rather large line spacing. And so when it came to blank unlined pages, the spacing and ‘straightness’ was a bit all over the place. I found this great blog article and set about printing out much smaller formatted lines for her copywork, and saw a big improvement in spacing after just a couple of weeks. I was also encouraged after re-reading this article from the AmblesideOnline website. I also realized that I need to keep a close and careful watch on copywork, and not just assign it and then step away to check my phone/get distracted with something else. Everly also started working on Cursive, using the Happy Handwriter workbook (which you can buy online through JumpLeapFly).
Maths:
We started off the year only doing Life of Fred and a traditional ‘quick’ Math workbook I found at a local stationary store and it was going okay. We love Life Of Fred, but I just felt that we were needing to cover the basics a bit more thoroughly (especially for my very creative/daydreaming daughter) and so after doing a quick placement test, we moved back to The Good & The Beautiful (see my post on Year 1 for more info on this) & started with the Level 2 book halfway through the year. We hadn’t finished Level 1 but had got 3/4 of the way through and I felt confident that Evs would catch up anything she might have missed. It is a spiral approach so the lessons ‘circle’ back and touch on previously taught concepts. We were only schooling on average, 3 mornings a week, and my focus was less on maths and more on the other subjects, and so this has been on my list to prioritze this year. Taking things slower definitely helped though, as both of us were getting frustarted so I am happy with where we are moving forward.
After spending a near fortune in having the entire years Math Books printed and bound for the last 2 years, I have decided to just print the lessons a few at a time here at home. I keep the loose pages in a flip file, and then just take out the pages we need for the day. I do have a nice eco friendly printer (here is a full review of our last printer, the Canon G3411, which I have since upgraded from to the Pixma G3470 simply because the previous one was not compatible with my Mac on wifi, and I was having to manually disconnect from the wifi and connect to the printer every time I needed to print…it was such a pain…but only something fellow Mac users would need to worry about…apart from that the printers are very similar).
Geography
Geography was something I didn’t feel we did enough of, especially with regards to mapwork (another thing to add to the list for the next year!). I simply used our globe to point out the countries we read about in our books. For more South African Geography, we carried on using the Riaan Manser ‘My First African Adventure’ which we had started using a few years ago, but didn’t get very far. This was a fun thing to do with all of my kiddies, and I then had them colour in the corresponding flags for the country we were reading about.
This next year I plan on doing much more South African geography (and using blank maps so we can work on our map work skills). The Home Geography & Elementary Geography books (pictured above) were nice to use during Morning Time, and these I simply read through a page at a time (sometimes it was a poem, sometimes a bit more of a detailed explanation of the compass or how the seasons work. It would have been nice to do more hands on activities with these lessons, but alas, I just didn’t get there this year…next year!).
Seabird & Tree in the Trail were interesting books, but I think I may substitute these books for more South African living books on adventure. They are quite difficult to get hold of (and usually expensive!), and while they are nice to learn about the US, there are some wonderful South African travel adventure books out there. For example, the Jay Heale ‘South African Sea Adventures’ would work well.
Nature Study & Science
Although we stared off with the Burgess Animal book, I quickly dropped it in favor of the wonderful (South African) ‘The Elephant Shrew and Company’ by Anna Rothmann. I also have her bird book, The Crow and Company, both of which I picked up second hand on BobShop. There really isn’t much point in learning about European/American birds and animals when we have such a variety of local critters that we can actually hear the calls of and see in the flesh. When Hippo was Hairy (there are a few different books in the series) are also wonderful to add in for some more African myths and tales.
We used our animal stories as subjects for art projects (I simply search for ‘line drawing tutorials’ on Youtube and then we follow along with the video). Click here for my favourite art/nature journaling supplies. I’ve loved how beautifully these have come out (even though that isn’t the point, I know) and I had my kids do them on pieces of paper, rather than in their journals, so that I can display them around the house. Here are a selection of Everly’s artwork.
As far as actual (proper Charlotte Mason style) nature journaling went, we didn’t do this nearly as often as I had planned. This is something I definitely have at the top of my list to do more of this next year.
History & Tales
I only got hold of a copy of A Children’s History of the World in the 3rd term, and so I used the Childcraft The Story of South Africa in place of it in terms 1 & 2. I plan on doing more local (South African) history in the coming years but finding copies of local living books has been a bit of a challenge as they aren’t easy to come by.
We continued with Our Island Story & Trial & Triumph (pretty heavy going in some places, but lots of really good discussions came out of that) and Little Duke & Joan of Arc (although it has us both in tears at the end) were pretty firm favourites for Everly. I photocopied and printed some of the Little Duke images in the book for Everly to colour in while she listened, to help keeps things interesting.
And in the Term 2 I found these great poster/printable timeline cards for each chapter in Our Island Story. While I think the idea is to use the corresponding chapter images to place on a timeline, I didn’t quite get there this year and instead printed them out on sticker paper (bought on Takealot here), and then had Everly stick them into her School Journal and write a title and the date. I am hoping to start a visual history timeline this year. Sometimes she added her own little drawings to the page too.
Some really fun connections were made as back in 2019 we went on a family trip to the UK with a little 8 month old Everly, and stayed at a hotel called the The Runnymede on Thames in Surrey. This was (close to!) where the Magna Charter was signed (and this was part of Our Island Story reading in Term 2). I found a photo of us all and it was a really exciting, real life lesson of history connections.
Literature:
The Wind in the Willows (Term 1) and Robin Hood (Term 3 and finished off in the holidays) I set as Everly’s own reading books for her to read herself. She then had to come and narrate to me what she had read. I had her do a couple of drawn narrations for these, but they would also be nice audiobooks to have on hand for free time/weekends and the holidays.
While we LOVE audiobooks in our family, I do feel strongly that as many physical copies of the scheduled books need to be read rather than listened to. Here is a nice bit of extra info from the Ambleside Advisory on audiobooks:
“Note on Audiobooks: While links to audio books are added as a courtesy, Miss Mason's approach to grammar and composition is heavily dependent upon the children receiving an immense amount of visual exposure to the written word over many years, so parents should exercise extreme caution in how many audiobooks they use each year. Our brains just work differently when we see the words.
For children who have difficulty reading, one solution is to have them follow the audio version along in a written text.
Librivox free audio is done by volunteers, and some are better than others. Heidi Nash has a list of some favorite Librivox readers. Be aware that apps, including Librivox, that have clickable ads can open a browser and allow children unfiltered access to the internet, even when browsers have been disabled by the parent. There are options: either download mp3 files from Librivox and listen without the app, or only install the app on a parent-controlled device. Librivox has a pay option to turn off ads.Cindy Rollins did a Circe Mason Jar podcast that included the role of audiobooks with difficult books. There's an archived copy here.” AmblesideOnline
Parables from Nature was nice to use for drawn narrations, and I loved seeing which parts of the story Everly chose to use for these.
Pilgrims Progress: as per a recommendation on the Ambleside Forum (well worth a visit if you can look beyond the chunkiness/seemingly old school website feel, there is so much gold in there!) I used Audible for my kids to listen to the dramatized version of Pilgrim’s Progress (unabridged!). While it seemed to go way over their heads a lot of the time, I am amazed at just how much they could narrate and how much they enjoyed it. We will do the same for Part 2 (Christina’s Journey) as there is a dramatized version of that on Audible too. We also read through the book I found somewhere (pictured above) during some morning time too. And this year all 3 of my kids are listening to Little Pilgrim’s Progress on Everand as a ‘free listen’ during lunch time, which they are enjoying. I don’t require a narration from them for that.
Art
As far as ‘official’ art lessons have gone, we did Lesson 1 of a brush drawing course I purchased and that was as far we we got haha. We did A LOT of painting though (mostly watercolour) and even some family painting sessions where I chose a tutorial on Youtube and all of us spent an afternoon painting together (even hubby!). Those were really fun and I’d like us to do more of these as a family.
Foreign Language
Our Foreign language this year consisted of lots of songs (Afrikaans & French on Spotify) and later in the year I got my hands on a secondhand set of the Krok en Dil Afrikaans readers. These we did once a week, but I had to rope my husband in to do the actual reading as I lived in UK for most of my primary school years and so my Afrikaans is pretty much non-existant, and my accent is terrible (I focus on the French side of things which was my second language in school).
Folk Songs & Hymns
The same as last year, I simply went onto spotify and found a playlist for the year (based on the Ambelside Rotation). We played these songs at breakfast time, in the car, whenever someone mentioned wanting to hear one of the songs. All 3 of my kids loved the folk songs selections. In my plan for the next year, I want to have morning time files for each of my kids and I plan on printing out the lyrics for the hymns and folks songs so they can follow along and learn the actual words (we have some pretty hilarious interpretations of the folk songs based on what my kids THINK the words are). All of my kids absolutely love Sea Shantys…and always request these. This playlist from Nathan Evans has been their favourite so far.
Poetry
We used the bigger poetry book above during our morning time, and then I did buy the AO Poetry Anthology Volume 2 which we worked through and finished. Each poet had a lovely introduction so we could get to know the poets better before reading their poems. In an ideal work we would have had a timeline up on the wall, and we could have added our poets to that…but alas…next year!
And before you worry about how on earth to ‘do’ poetry, here is a great reminder from the AblesideOnline website:
How do you "do" poetry? Simply read it and enjoy it, re-read it, read it again and listen to the sound of the phrases, let them paint a word picture in your mind. AmblesideOnline Year 1
Art Study (Picture Study & Composer Study)
For artists study, I simply printed out the artwork from the corresponding AO Artist rotation (click here) and then had my children look at the artwork for a minute or so and then turn away and tell me what they saw. I once had them try to draw what they could remember, but this ended in arguments (and tears!) all around as their work wasn’t ‘good enough’ or they felt frustrated at their skills. Needless to say, I didn’t attempt that again haha.
For composer study (click here), I just had the AO Composer playlist from Spotify on my phone, and we would listen to the songs sporadically through the year.
Handicrafts
We didn’t do a huge amount of handicrafts this year, but did do some Origami (Aaron enjoyed this a lot) and Everly had some sewing lessons with our wonderful Nanny, Zuki. Everly loves cutting up bits of rags and materials to make things for her dolls and toys, and is excited to get better at sewing so she can make some ‘proper’ clothing items this next year.
Exams
Something that we did manage to start this year was Exams. I wrote a whole post on our first time doing Exams (click here to read) and the whole process (once I had wrapped my head around the logisitcs) was great! The exams were a nice way of ‘checking in’ after each term, and reassessing things that we needed to focus more on, or even things that we needed to drop to keep the happiness in our homeschool. We only did exams after Term 1 & 2…somehow it was suddenly Christmas when we wrapped up Term 3 and I just didn’t get around to doing them at the end of Term.
Whew! After writing this post and looking back at our year, I am greatly encouraged by everything we DID do. If we do less this next year, but are able to keep focusing on the good, true and the beautiful every day, I think we will be just fine.
As always, I love hearing from you. Please leave me a comment if you have any questions about what I’ve talked about above or if you have any ideas/suggestions on anything you’ve done differently in your homeschool journey.
Roxy
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