Our Homeschool Diary: Planning The New Homeschool Year

Buzz -Buzz Around Us

Most families have officially started their AY 2022-2023. Each morning I hear the busy buzz-buzz in our neighborhood. There are two schools in the vicinity - one next to our home, the other one is just across the road. Most traditional schools here in the UAE have face to face classes already. Well, I am thankful I do not have to be in the middle of their daily buzzing, but boy, oh boy! Do I have my own battle right now. :D

We homeschool all year round...

While we homeschool all year round, we also somehow follow the academic school year of most schools. We still need to provide grades to the school where we are connected for record-keeping purposes hence the "alignment".

We love the flexibility of having to take day(s) off whenever the situation calls for it -- say for example now that my husband has taken a few days off from work. When he is off from work, we also take off days from school.

Building Our Curriculum

It's going to be the third year that we are no longer connected to a homeschool provider. We were with a provider for three years, from when we started homeschooling and that's where I learned a lot about homeschooling and I followed their suggested curriculum, too.

For years now, we are using AOP LifePac. We've played around Khan Academy and The Good and The Beautiful for Maths for my younger two. Our approach is mostly eclectic -- what works, we do. I try not to veer far from the curriculum though.

Charlotte Mason?

I've been reading a lot about the Charlotte Mason approach, thanks to @romeskie who inspired me on this. I think she is the only one I know who follows this method. My then homeschool provider discussed this method with us, albeit very lightly and the more I know about it, the more I come to like it. CM approach is interesting, and I think would work for us but my main issue is gathering the necessary resources. CM approach uses Living Books, and these are not easy to find in my area.

I came across the Ambleside Online, a free homeschool resource for the CM approach. They have a repository of books and other resources already sorted per applicable year level. Most of these resources are links to free ebooks (no copyright - like the Project Gutenberg) or Amazon links. It is good, but I feel that actual books are still better. While I have already printed and bound some books, sometimes I feel that printing this much is too much, and that I should just settle for the ebook version. That is my major dilemma.

So I have spent a good two weeks trying to put together a new curriculum based on the Charlotte Mason approach, but I feel like I did not make any progress. Right now, I am settling into the fact that I may just continue with our current curriculum for which I already have the required books.

Sprinkling a Bit of CM

Having said this, I am still planning to sprinkle a bit of Charlotte Mason here and there in our homeschool. Some of the areas we will be adapting would be copy work, poetry, picture study, music study, and foreign language. We have been doing narration for quite some time, but still do a lot of paper work.

Okay, I think that's not just a little, but a major part of the Charlotte Mason approach. Perhaps, if I eventually decide to just download the available living books from Ambleside Online, then we'd go full throttle.

To help me get more acquainted with the Charlotte Mason approach, I have also been listening a lot to the Simply Charlotte Mason channel. It's a lot to digest and I guess at one point I got too overwhelmed. I need a breather, perhaps. Then I will decide. Or maybe I have already decided. Yaiks. What a mess.

How about you, what's the plan for the year? Are you also using the Charlotte Mason approach?