Ambleside Online

As part of our curriculum we are using the free online Ambleside Curriculum, this is however not all we use. I like the schedule of reading Aesop's Fables, Poetry, Just So Stories and some other fables and living history type books each week. We have liked the books we are reading so far. However, I am not being rigid about the schedule.

Rhiannon absolutely loved the book "Paddle to the Sea" by Holling C. Holling and I was not about to tell her, no you have to wait to read the next two chapters next week. I know there is advantage to reading just small bits at a time, digesting and discussing and expanding on them. I know she did not get quite as much out of it as she might have had we done just two chapters a week. Yet she felt a passion for reading a book about the Great Lakes and all the geography and science around those. She went to find it on the globe and discuss it. She discovered that a "school" book is not dry. So why wait and make into something?

She also loves the Garden of Children's Verses and is unlikely to put it down after just one poem. I side with going with her interest even when I know she is getting more exposure to surface level than digging deep. There are times she wants to dig deeper. Like today in reading the Aesop Fable about the Jackdaw she wanted to know more about what kind of bird it was and that spurred some internet research and discussion.

For science this year I have all our books on a shelf and she goes and picks one and that starts our science lesson of the day. Today she picked an encyclopedia of sorts and was reading several pages about weather and storms, volcanoes, earthquakes, pretty much all the worst of natural disasters. She then asked to learn more about floods. So some days we dig deepr, some days we leanr a little about a lot of things and it all balances out in the end. That is one of the reasons I love the fleibility of homeschooling.

Peace,
Tenn