Since I told you what kind of mess I’m making this school year, I thought I’d point you to some of the resources I draw from:

I’m using Ambleside Online for our core. There is a lot of community there–more than I’ve taken advantage of, even. Just go poke around a while and see what you like.

To keep costs down, we buy most of our books used from Thriftbooks and Amazon. If you use AO’s schedule, I hope you’ll also click through their affiliate links in the booklists to help keep that vital site alive.

Simply Charlotte Mason has a lot of my favorite resources. If I were starting my homeschool from scratch, I think I’d just buy one of everything.

Instead of the AO artist schedule, I use Picture Study Portfolios from SCM, one new work of art per week. They have a nice book to read about the artist, so I break that up into a weekly reading of a few paragraphs until we’ve gotten through the portfolio. This term, we’re doing Hokusai, since it lines up with one of the children’s history readings.

Using Language Well, also from Simply Charlotte Mason, is our grammar, spelling, and dictation.

I’m also starting to use the Art of Composition books from SCM this year for my older students.

For handwriting, I use Handwriting Without Tears.

We’d always used Math-U-See and Saxon before, but this year I’m doing an entirely Life of Fred approach. I expect that to be a lot of fun.

For Latin, I’m still unsure which program we’ll start with. I have Wheelock’s Latin, as well as some other stuff. As a supplement to whatever we use, we’ll add analyses from Digital Monastery. There’s a book available now, Praying in Latin, that I’ll dip into for our morning meeting prayers. I’ll hopefully get time to review that soon.

Suggested reading for moms and dads:

Laying Down the Rails and The Lost Tools of Learning to help us think about this massive endeavor we’ve taken on.

Dumbing Us Down to put some steel in our spines for those days we’re tempted to put this difficult job off on the school system. And the Holy Bible, most importantly. You’re not gonna get anywhere without that.

All of this stuff gets organized in the Homeschool Planet Planner. I had been reluctant to pay for an app to organize things, having plenty of paper and pens at hand, and being kind of old and set in my ways. But my friend Alex sold me on it, and it has been a very pleasant way to plan and keep on track. In addition to scheduling and planning, there’s a transcript service and 4 year blueprint for keeping track of high school requirements. Worth every dime to me! I think there may be some features I’m not using to the fullest yet, but as far as I’ve explored, it’s been great!

Along the same lines, I’ve caught wind of this new app called SpeedyRecord. If it works the way I think it does, it could be super helpful for those of us who hate keeping records of what was done, grading, and making transcripts. I don’t know if I’ll implement it this year, but it’s on my “interesting” list.

That’s probably enough linkage for one day. I hope some of these links give you ideas for your own homeschool!

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