AmblesideOnline Year 2
a recap of our second official Charlotte Mason homeschool year
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 and has just begun 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.
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.
»»»> Click here for a recap of AmblesideOnline Year 1
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 school 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 I have enough time to throw 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 or 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 we stay from bigger cities/towns, my kids can only do what is offered on the one day that we do a ‘town trip’ and the rest of the week is for a lot of outdoor/farm life and play.
Above 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 can’t blame her, I do the same!).
Handwriting/Copywork:
This was an area where I didn’t think I needed to be concerned about 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 (says every homeschooling parent…ever!), 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 keeping a close and careful watch on copywork, and not just assigning it and then stepping away to check my phone/get distracted with something else. Everly also started work on Cursive, using the Happy Handwriter workbook (which you can buy online through JumpLeapFly).
Maths:
We started off the year 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 but started with the Level 2 book halfway through the year. We didn’t finish 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 prioritise this year. Taking things slower definitely helped though, as both of us were getting frustrated so I am happy with where we are moving forward.