Little House Learning Co. — Ambleside Online

It's spring, and for me that means planning for a new school year!  This coming school year, 2025-2026, I will have a 5th grader, 3rd grader and 1st grader, so I wanted to detail how I plan a homeschool year with Ambleside Online. (And let me forewarn you that this is going to be a very detailed post!) We have used AO now for 5 years and every year I use it, it gets easier to plan. I feel sad at times that the disorganization of their website and the poor SEO of their forum discourage people from using the...

Our family has used the Ambleside Online homeschool curriculum now for two years so I wanted to do a more in-depth curriculum review of why we chose Ambleside Online and how it varies from similar Charlotte Mason curricula.  If you're just getting started or are curious about Ambleside Online, check out this post: Getting Started with Ambleside Online. Why We Chose Ambleside Online First, I love that it is free. There is nothing more discouraging than paying tons of money for a curriculum and then finding out it isn't a fit! You still need to buy all of the books but you're not paying for the "curriculum...

What is Ambleside Online?  From their website, amblesideonline.org "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." Ambleside Online is essentially a free book list and schedule for each year of formal education, starting at age 6, for history, literature, poetry, geography, and science. They also include information about artist study, composer study, folk songs, and hymn study. You have to pick a separate curriculum for math and foreign language.  The tricky thing about AO is that you...

We are in full swing with our First Grade year! I get asked often about what we’re using for different subjects, so I figured I would list it out here!  The spine of our curriculum is Ambleside Online Year 1. This curriculum covers many of our subjects, but some of them I substituted for alternatives.  Our 1st Grade Curriculum Bible: AO has Bible readings listed out, but I substituted our own alternative of The Child’s Story Bible by Vos because we were in the middle of it last year and enjoyed it so much we decided to finish it! We are also making our...