Term 1 Update: What Worked + What We Changed

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We are back from a break after term one of this school year and for the sake of transparency, I want to give my readers a brief update.

For the most part, things went pretty well. But there were a few challenges that I wanted to address in this post. Those stem around a variety of things in our season of life, our choice in school books, and pacing of the readings.

Just as an aside, I want to say that I don’t believe there is a perfect curriculum that checks all of the boxes for all of the families. I’m sharing what works and what doesn’t and our experiences in hopes that it is helpful to other homeschool mamas. This is the beauty of homeschooling — we can pivot and make choices for the needs of each individual student and change along the way when something just isn’t working.

What Went Well

Our math choices this year have been really good and all of the children have enjoyed doing their lessons. However, we are also slowly pivoting away the CM math curriculum and I will use the Lepanto Math for my year 1 student this year and next year while also paired with some LOF.

Everything has also been going really well with our common subjects, morning time work + readings. I shared in detail what we are using in this post about our 2025-2026 Classical Charlotte Mason Curriculum Picks.

In addition, everything we selected for our spiritual formation has been great! We are adding in more individual saint stories/biographies and removing Proverb Stories and Parents’ Assistant to continue with our other Catholic moral and spiritual readings.

The choices of novels that I shared in our curriculum post have all been great and the children have nearly finished all of them and we are just beginning term 2. So, I’ll have to select new options soon. My son especially has enjoyed the Penrod series and my daughter has loved the Anne of Green Gables series.

Myths, fables, and fairy tales have also been a hit. Some of the adventure stories have been great…others have been a miss. And I share more of that below.

What we are changing

If you’ve been following along with our blog for some time, you will know that we are a Classical Charlotte Mason home. I have used The CMEC for a few years and have combined it with TCT for the past two years. We love the poetic mode and it has been life giving in our home.

But, not all of the recommendations from any of the curriculums we have used have been a perfect fit for our particular family. And that’s ok, right. 😉

Our main changes for terms 2 & 3 are around language arts, math, history, literature, latin…and overall pacing/scheduling of readings.

I believe in the wisdom of Charlotte Mason and shorter lessons. The pacing and scheduling of readings from TCT has been too much for my students to keep up with. With our home life, cattle ranch, and other homestead work, we just cannot be in lessons until 2-3 pm each day. I like to keep a few things for afternoon work like handicrafts, music lessons, and artwork, etc. — but also spread out throughout the week.

Language Arts

We are slightly changing things up with our language arts program, and we are still doing regular narrations, copywork, and dictation.

We have also been using the Ligua Mater program and it has been going really well.

But… even with copywork and dictation lessons, we are still struggling with spelling. So, I want to get even more phonics based lessons in our homeschool and I’ve decided to test out the Spalding method. I will write an update on how this goes for us in the future.

And because of this, for our youngest (year 1), I’ve decided to introduce The Little Angel Reader program for her first year. This is a program that I used with my previous students, but we stopped using to focus on other things.

Literature

Again, the pacing has been way off for our family. And while I do want to challenge my students, I also don’t want them to find the work too fatiguing. So, I have paired our readings way back.

Also, I have not been too keen on some of the recommendations from John Senior’s list. None of us are really in to the sea faring adventure stories and honestly, they were a slog to get through.

And, I’ve also found the use of inappropriate language in some books to be… well, not appropriate. Sure, that’s how cowboys or sailors may have talked or whatever. But, I still don’t appreciate it in our home. This is also partly my fault for trusting the lists and not pre-reading every single book. I just did not have the time this past summer like I usually do.

So, lesson learned.

Going forward, I will just need to make the time to pre-read ahead and be a bit more selective in our chosen readings. 😅

Poetry

We have been reading poetry together in the mornings — just for the sake of enjoying them. We are mostly choosing between seasonal poems or one of our anthologies.

But, I’ve also simplified the children’s individual poetry reading + recitations. We were testing out including a variety of poetry options this year, but just went back to what we were previously doing.

My year 1 student and I are reading from A.A. Milne, and Mother Goose’s Melodies we also have this Mother Goose book to enjoy together. She also has been enjoying all of these on a Yoto MYO card at her leisure.

My year 4 + year 6 students are continuing with using Harp and Laurel Wreath at their appropriate reading section and each has their own copy.

History

History is another big change. I just wasn’t enjoying the spines we were reading from The CMEC and the historical fiction options we picked from TCT + pacing again was an issue.

So, here’s what we are using going forward…

• Year 1 history: D’Aulaires’ biographies + saint stories
• Year 2 history: Little House books + saint stories
• Year 3 history: continuing Little House books + saint stories
• Our Pioneers and Patriots (will be using as a spine for years 3-5)
• The Old World and America (will be using as a spine for years 6-8)
• We also have enjoyed this book for years 4-6: A History of England for Catholic Children
• High School history: I am planning to start with this book as a spine and add in additional sources as I find them. We will also add in Russian, Spanish, English, and Italian histories in there somewhere. Plus, an additional general medieval history.

Of course, I will add in additional saint stories and biographies based on the timeline that we are studying. But, I’ve taken several weeks to research options, order + preview fresh history books. I have also shared some of our favorite saint books and biographies in previous posts and you can find our most recent one here.

Latin

We have been using The Literature Through Stories program as recommended by TCT. But our subscription is nearly over and I did not want to renew it again. So we are moving over to using this Getting Started with Latin program and will continue with Memoria Press Latin again either later on this year or next.

We have been using Ligua Angelica for our morning hymns and I put a pause on the other Latin from Memoria Press this year due to a super busy season.

But we will pick back up with Latina Christiana for my year 4 student, First Form Latin for my year 6 student, and my year 1 student will begin Prima Latina next year. And then possibly using Henle for the high school years.

What I love about the Memoria Press Latin programs are the guided lesson videos, and they are not a subscription like the University of Dallas program. So, I only have to re-purchase the consumables for future years.