Ambleside Online

Hi Faith,

I am using some of the recommendations from Ambleside. I tried to incorporate quite a bit of it but it got to be too much. They say to pick and choose, so perhaps I jumped in too quickly. Some of the books are great, some are really hard. Some things I could not see the purpose of. When I happened upon Simply Charlotte Mason, I was refreshed with Sonya and Karen’s curriculum guide. I would recommend, if you would choose to use Ambleside, that you really review the books to make sure your children can handle them.

I’m no expert, but I do have an opinion 🙂 on a ‘set curriculum.’ If you are speaking of a curriculum that includes all subjects, I think that it takes away your ability to give gentle nudges where your children struggle, and big pushes where they are gifted. I also think it reduces the ability of your children to pursue their own interests when the sparks of curiousity ignite.

Ending abruptly as daughter dumps wrong ingredient in dessert!

Blessings,

Cindy

I’ve used AO also for several years. I always have trouble with “set” curricula! I always want to tweak here and there and suit this child better and end up adjusting and tweaking so much I lost the benefit of the predone schedule. Also I concur with the above posters who had some difficulties with some book suggestions. I also had to dump some books–I do want my older children to read mythology, for instance, but I don’t want them totally saturated in it! I think the issue that finally pointed out to me how much more “in tune” Sonya and Karen are with my own ideas was the constant Shakespeare play reading—three a year, when there are so many plays I just do NOT want to read to a ten-year-old! I think they ended up changing it, but I downloaded the stuff one year to find the Merry Wives of Windsor on the rotation. Uh, NOT in this house!

That said, there are some terrific books over there. We’ve “migrated” a few with us and just include them in our schedules how we want. I’m particularly fond of the nature reading books on AO. But I found it very easy to add my favorite AO books to the Curriculum Guide here, and then schedule them easily in the CM Organizer. Simple!

I have to admit, I like the artist and composer modules here at SCM much better. We are getting a much greater variety and we are enjoying switching every six weeks. We kind of “mush” poetry between the two and then add some other favorite books of mine because I really, really like poetry! The ds’s not so much yet, though. 🙁 Perhaps one day.

Hi, Angie!

I have two main reasons for wanting my older children to have some exposure to pagan mythology.

1. Literary allusions. There are SO MANY allusions to mythology in literature! Even magazine articles today. I see them everywhere! You’ll be forever “out of the loop” and not understanding the author’s intent if you have no idea what “Achilles’heel” means. Or what a “siren song” is. Or a “Pandora’s box” These are pretty obvious ones, but there are subtler ones. What does an author mean when he accuses someone of “flying too close to the sun”? You miss a lot if you cannot get the meaning from these. Fortunately you can look up some of the obvious ones if you have to, and also fortunately, you really don’t need to immerse yourself in the stuff to get a lot of meaning from these allusions. But I think it’s worthwhile to understand them. The influence on literature has been so profound that I think it foolhardy to totally ignore it.

2. Worldview. Older children are often ready for deeper discussions of worldview. I owe my understanding of this to Michelle Miller, the author of the Truthquest guides. But the pagan mythology stories aren’t simply random stories. They illustrate so much of who the Greeks, the Romans, the Scandinavians, were, and what they believed and felt. And given the deep and profound influence of these societies on Western civilization, it is a worthwhile study to try to figure out what these stories say about these people, and why God’s Word is vitally different. What does it say about Greeks that their chief god, Zeus, was a womanizing beast, and his wife was a jealous and spiteful shrew? Worth pondering and discussing with older students.

That said, everyone has to decide what is right for their own children. I’m trying to send mine off prepared to critically evaluate and confront our current culture, and mythology has a lot of bearing on this.