My Kids' Favorite (& Least Favorite) Ambleside Online Books Years 1, 3, 4
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- Опубликовано: 11 сен 2024
- Here's my kids' favorite and least favorite Ambleside Online books, as stated by them! I also share our most enjoyable read alouds this year as a family. One thing Ambleside Online has done for us is to get us reading so many incredible books. It's put a taste for quality literature in our home that wasn't there before.
One set of family read aloud books I forgot to mention that held their attention like glue was the Great Brain books. There are 6 or 7, and we read 3.
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Any Holling Clancy Holling book is always a favorite for us! Paddle to the Sea our first year is probably the most memorable Y1 book we read. Will you get to read Pagoo soon?
We’re reading Sign of the Beaver right now at bedtime and I’m the one who is like “one more chapter!” haha.
So many excellent books and I’ll be looking into a couple of these for our read aloud schedule for next year!
My 3rd grader got to read Pagoo and it was SO good! She didn't mention it as a favorite, but so many connections were made when we got to visit the ocean! It was a favorite for me for sure. Hope you found a new goodie to try here and thanks for sharing.
Y2 - The Little Duke! We also read Twenty and Ten and loved it as well.
My daughter loved Pagoo! ❤
We are doing a mixture of year 2 and 3 this year to “catch up” (also a couple year 1 that we never finished) so we can do year 4 next year with my 2 oldest. My 3 youngest are still too young for formal lessons.
We loved Just So Stories. We love
The little house on the prairie books.
Also The Burgess Book of Animals is so fun!
Thanks for sharing! Also love seeing how you combined your oldest 2. Agree on Just So Stories…so bizarre and yet memorable!
It was definitely interesting to read aloud! But my kids just ate it up.
Wonderful books! Just from some of the books you mentioned we loved were The Princess and the Goblin, Red Sails to Capri, Sign of the Beaver, and Paddle to the Sea. Those were favorites here during different years in our homeschool.
Thanks for sharing!
Year 4- Favorite was definitely Pagoo, but it’s our first year with AO, so we are bouncing around in the years! 😊
Pagoo is soo good! Now you’ve got me thinking my year 4 would love to read this too because he missed the other Holling books! Thanks for sharing!
@@LizBlueandHazel Yes! I just had her do three chapters per week and then she would narrate! But you could just do it as a Summer free read!
We loved Red Sails to Capri! So many good books here! ❤
My kids have all hated Storybook of Science, we tried 3x. I don't know why I found it enjoyable.
How funny! I like their brutal honesty! When you find they really don’t like a certain one, do you find it most helpful to make them finish it or do you give them another book to try within that subject? Or drop altogether? I’m so curious to see if my daughter will like/dislike different year 4 books next year than her brother did this year. Or if there will be trends in favorites and least favorites.
@@LizBlueandHazel We ended up scrapping it for kid number 2-3. I don't think I will use it with my fourth, might try again with kid 5 in 4 years 😂
Thanks for sharing. We just started AO this year too. My daughter is just finishing Y3! She loved Pollyanna.
Would you mind sharing about your schedule/rhythm and routine; what and when you do things?
I’d love to put a video together on this. I’ll be honest that this was my biggest struggle this year, using AO with 3 levels and a toddler. I know I’m not alone there, but would be happy to show what it looked like this year. I’m great at creating a schedule, not so great at following through. 😆
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 was so much fun to listen to! Back when my oldest was seven? I think, and we first tried AO. (Year 1)...I remember we liked Aesop's Fables and "Our Island Story". They (my two youngest would listen in at that time), did not like Burgess' Animal book (I had a friend who gave us a free study guide to go with the animal one so we did that one instead of birds) because of the "Mother Earth" character. As we discussed it, I felt uncomfortable with the character. We read some more but we ended up dropping the book. I like reading fairy tales and myths to my kids so I don't know why this character made the HS jump in everyone's hearts and say, "no" but that was our experience. Other than those three, I don't remember much else...but I have a first grader for next school year and we are coming back to AO...so I will hopefully remember some more of these books!
Thanks for sharing! The Burgess animal book is on our list next year so I’m curious how it will go. Good for you for doing what felt right for your family, so important! Have fun going through the 1st grade reads next year, they’re all such sweet books. What will your big kids be doing?
@@LizBlueandHazel WOW...so thank you for your comment... because it caused me to really dig deep into my ideas for next school year, the rhythm that is working for our family, and so...
I won't be doing Year 1 of AO with my first grader after all...lol!
So, thinking about what I would be doing with his older sisters caused me to realize a few things:
1. I can and am still a CM homeschooler whether or not I use AO
2. I remembered the reason I stopped using AO after Year 1 with my oldest...we like to do A LOT of the school subjects as a family (group work) and I don't want or need to stop that at this stage (I have a 11 year old, 9 year old, 6 year old, and 3 year old).
So...yep yep...
A BIG thank you ❤️
I’m coming over from your BW videos. Did you replace BW with Ambleside? If so did you do a video on the why?
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.