Charlotte Mason Homeschool Books: How We Built Our Curriculum Plan for Three Kids This Year

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Every summer around this time, I sit down with my planner, a cup of coffee gone lukewarm, and the quiet, happy work of mapping out the year ahead. It’s one of my favorite parts of homeschooling — not because I have it all figured out, but because this is the moment I get to choose the actual Charlotte Mason homeschool books that will shape our days, term by term, child by child.

This year, I built our plan for each child using A Delectable Education’s Curriculum Cohort — their guidance was invaluable in helping me think through pacing, book selection, and how each subject should build across the forms. I’m sharing our year here not as a curriculum guide for you to copy exactly, but as an honest, behind-the-scenes look at how one Charlotte Mason family chooses its books and builds its rhythm.

Before you keep reading: if you’re staring down your own stack of resources and wondering where to even start, grab my free July Planning Checklist — it walks you through the exact steps I use to move from “overwhelmed” to “I have a plan” before the new school year begins.

Why Charlotte Mason Homeschool Books Look Different for Every Child

One of the things I love most about a real Charlotte Mason curriculum is that it never asks three children to meet in the middle. My youngest, six years old, is just beginning his formal lessons — short, oral, story-soaked. My oldest, eleven, has crossed into a season where she’s carrying more of her own education: longer readings, written narration, real independence with her books.

Choosing the right Charlotte Mason homeschool books for each of them isn’t about finding “the” list — it’s about understanding what each child is ready for and building forward from there.

Knowledge of God: The Charlotte Mason Curriculum Books That Start Our Mornings

Together during morning time, we all soak in Scripture — the backbone that everything else rests on. We work through one Old Testament book and one New Testament book, alternating days so that we are always living in both stories at once.

This is where I always begin when I’m choosing our Charlotte Mason homeschool books for the year — before history, before literature, before anything else. Scripture sets the tone for the whole feast.

Knowledge of Man: Our Living Books List for Language, History, and Literature

This is where the bulk of our year lives, and where the differences between my three children show up the most in our living books list.

Language Arts and Charlotte Mason Narration

My six-year-old is still deep in the tactile, patient work of learning to read and form his letters — narration is brand new, and I’m learning right alongside him to simply listen without correcting, without nagging, without rushing him toward polish she doesn’t have yet. My eleven-year-olds are doing real dictation work now — studying a passage, visualizing its spelling, and writing it from memory — plus copywork pulled from their own favorite lines of literature.

History and Geography: Building Our Living Books List

My youngest is meeting the earliest chapters of his own country’s story through picture-rich living books and short biographies alongside a history spine — Leif the Lucky and Pocahontas by the D’Aulaires are two that I’m especially looking forward to.

My older two have stepped into something bigger: three streams running at once — their own country’s history through books like Poor Richard and Abigail Adams: Witness to a Revolution, their neighbor’s history in Our Island Story, and their first real introduction to the ancient world through The Story of the Greeks by Guerber.

My older two started their Book of Centuries last year, which has been one of the quiet delights of the fall — watching them connect a date from their Bible reading to one from their history spine to one from ancient Greece, all on the same page.

Literature, Poetry, and Citizenship

My youngest is living inside A.A. Milne’s Now We Are Six this term, with Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song waiting for him in the spring, alongside fairy tales and fables read slowly enough to actually know them.

My older two are working through Oliver Twist, with The Wind in the Willows and The Hobbit still, plus a term poet, Bulfinch’s Age of Fable, and a couple of Shakespeare plays, which we are working through with our co-op — The Tempest and As You Like It — read aloud together. My older two are also reading a life from Plutarch each term for citizenship, starting with Pyrrhus, which we also plan to cover during our co-op.

Recitation

Recitation happens for both of them every day of the week — a psalm, a poem, a passage of Scripture, spoken beautifully. We don’t drill for memorization; we just read the same short pieces with such attention and love that they end up living in memory anyway, which I think is exactly the point. If you’re just getting started with this, I highly recommend the recitation planner from A Delectable Education– it not only walks you through how to do recitation, but provides suggested passages for each form, and a planner for keeping track of the ones you use year to year.

Knowledge of the Universe: Nature Study, Math, and Homeschool Organization

This is the part of our year that happens as much outside as at the table, and it’s also where good homeschool organization matters most — these are the subjects that quietly fall off the schedule if you don’t plan for them on purpose.

Nature Study and Handicrafts

All three of my children have daily time outdoors devoted to real, unhurried nature study — not a worksheet, just attention. My youngest is spending his lesson time with living nature books like from the Eyes and No Eyes series by Arabella Buckley, and my older two will start the year with Charles Kingsley’s Madam How and Lady Why, alongside their own nature notebook full of weekly brush drawings. We also love using Sabbath Mood Homeschool’s Term Science Guides and her Nature’s Explorers series for nature study with our nature group.

Handicrafts round out our afternoons — needlecraft, a term craft, and real service projects. My youngest is working on paper folding this year; my older two will be working on knitting projects for a family in need. If you’re needing help getting started with this, I once again recommend A Delectable Education’s Handicraft planner– such a helpful guide to thinking this through!

Math and French: Filling Gaps in Our Charlotte Mason Curriculum

For math, we are using Saxon with my older two, since this aligns best with our co-op which covers math. I wrestled with this decision long and hard– Saxon, I’ll admit, is not my favorite math curriculum, but because they will be doing a class at co-op, my compromise is to use this while also bringing in CM’s methodology in teaching new concepts using Strayer-Upton and Simply Charlotte Mason’s Living Arithmetic resource.

I’ll be using RightStart with my youngest this year — I have loved this so far and appreciate that it aligns in many ways to CM’s methodology for teaching math.

For French, we’re using Cherrydale Press’ Speaking French with Miss Mason, along with French stories and songs, which has been a lovely fit for the hearing-then-speaking approach Charlotte Mason recommended for language learning. My good friend, who is fluent in French and also following the Charlotte Mason method at home, put together a simple syllabus to use, which has been a blessing to me!

How A Delectable Education’s Curriculum Cohort Helped Me Choose Our Charlotte Mason Homeschool Books

I’ll be honest — building a full year of Charlotte Mason homeschool books from scratch, term by term, subject by subject, for two different forms is a lot. This year I leaned on A Delectable Education’s Curriculum Cohort to help me think through pacing and book selection, and it saved me hours of second-guessing. If you’re just getting started with using Charlotte Mason curriculum at home, I highly recommend going through their course.

In the end, I still made the final calls for our family — swapping in some resources that were a better fit for our family — but having a thoughtful starting framework made the whole process so much less overwhelming.

Why We Choose Charlotte Mason Homeschool Books Over a Boxed Curriculum

If there’s one thing I hope this peek into our year communicates, it’s this: a full, rich Charlotte Mason education isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing the right things, in short lessons, with real books, and giving each child room to actually meet what’s in front of them. It is more important to be present and joyful with your children than to worry about checking every single box — and that’s exactly what a good plan is for. It took me years to trust that structure like this doesn’t crowd out the feast.

Homeschool Organization Tips for Building Your Own Living Books List

If you’re building your own living books list right now, here’s what I’d tell a friend over coffee:

Start with Knowledge of God. Everything else builds outward from Scripture.
Plan by child, not by grade. Two kids in the “same” grade may need very different books.
Don’t be afraid to swap resources mid-plan. We moved off our original math curriculum this year because it wasn’t the right fit — and that’s not failure, that’s homeschool planning done well.
Leave room for a framework to guide you. Whether that’s a curriculum cohort, a mentor, or a planning tool, you don’t have to build your living books list alone.

More Charlotte Mason Curriculum Resources You’ll Love

If this post was helpful, here are a few more from the blog that go deeper on planning your own Charlotte Mason curriculum:

Ready to Plan Your Own Charlotte Mason Homeschool Books List?

I know exactly how it feels to stare at a stack of resources and a blank term planner and wonder where to even begin. That’s precisely why I built Plan Your Year — a workshop that walks you, step by step, through mapping your own year the way I just walked you through ours: starting with what matters most, working outward from there, and ending with a plan you actually trust.

If you’re ready to stop guessing and finally build a year you love, I’d love for you to join us.

Come slowly. Come faithfully. The feast is laid.