I have three students in Years 6, 4, and 2 and after having everyone in different time periods with the Ambleside rotation last year, I knew we should never do that again. We could’t do any books together and it was hard for me to manage.
I came up with a new rotation combining the streams of history chart from A Delectable Education with the books from Ambleside Online. Our new history rotation is described in the chart below and I created some spreadsheets listing out all the AO books by form and time period to fit them into our new rotation. So we’ll still use most of the AO books, just in different years. It’s not a perfect system, it’s still a little messy trying to figure everything out every year, but this year it was wonderful to all be studying the same time period. I had to supplement some books because the AO books on that topic were not age appropriate, etc, but it has mostly worked out so far.
The chart below shows our history rotation (click image to view larger). This year we did 1900-present and Middle Ages. Next year we will do Ancient Greece and 1650-1800. (If you’re familiar with the ADE rotation, we are skipping the first time period in their rotation – Ancient East-Egypt and 1000-1650 because my oldest already went through those time periods once in the first 4 or 5 years of Ambleside. I felt like it was more important for him to get the other time periods one more time each. Confused?? Me too… From here on we’ll stick to the ADE rotation.)
I’ve linked my PDFs below for the Ambleside Online books organized by subject and form rather than Year. If you’re interested in trying to do what we’re doing and use AO books with another history rotation, I hope you find these helpful! If you have any questions about how to revamp your history rotation, email me! [kelseyatvanillajoydotcom]
{Form 3 and 4 are really tiny so all the info could stay on one or two pages, so just zoom in.}
