Build Your Library Curriculum - Level 0 Review

Great review! We are halfway through BYL 0 and have been loving it. We skipped around too. We jumped to Asia because of Lunar New Year. I totally agree with you about the art and cooking. Except for making the apple pie in the first week, I prefer to have someone with more experience do the cooking. And for art, we prefer more open ended art to craft projects. I am looking forward to level 1.

going to the restaurants is such a good idea - no idea why i havent thought of that

I LOVE BYL and am so happy to see more reviews of it. You can follow it as Emily’s scheduled out or move around it the best way for your family and life. Her book lists are amazing and the entire thing is easy to follow and incredibly affordable. Our books come from the library and thrift books. Even though we are what you would call unschoolers who incorporate Waldorf and Charlotte mason, BYL is always kind of a spine for us. It works however you wanna roll. Like you said about the art, if something isn’t for you, skip it. I’m not going to pretend like we have a particular schedule or structure in our homeschool, but reading aloud and lively discussion is the one thing we all enjoy and hang onto. Emily’s videos , particularly her early ones on narration, how it’s done and the various ways to do it were such a guiding light for me starting out on this homeschool journey. I have learned and continue to learn so much right along side my children.
Fantastic idea going out to eat traditional food from a culture you’re studying! We made an Ancient Greek feast for a Waldorf unit we did once and I swear the kids only remember anything about Ancient Greece because of that yummy feast.
Thanks for the great share!

I had decided to go with this curriculum before watching your video. But I’m glad to see it worked well. I liked your idea of writing up all the assignments so that we can be more flexible. I think that would work better for my situation too. Often, when we start a chapter book my daughter wants to keep going, so having the flexibility to do that is good. I was planning on only doing school Monday thru Thursday, so it would help to not have to follow a five day schedule. I had also worried about Little House when I saw it on the book list so good to know you all got through it. Now that I think about it my daughter would probably love some of the things they do in the book since we recently moved to the country. She has been loving helping with the garden and gathering the chicken eggs. Plus we live in Amish country so she actually sees people using a horse and buggy as regular transportation.

Thanks for the review. I have a 2 and 3 yro that I was thinking of schooling together when the time comes and this looks like a perfect fit.

I know this is an older video, but your review is so helpful! I am planning to use this with my youngest this fall. My oldest will be using MFW exploring countries and cultures and I am hoping to mesh our lessons together for a family study.

We are working our way through Lvl 0. We were originally going straight through, but I had also purchased Sassafras Zoology before I heard of BYL. So it is good to hear you took it out of order because I am starting that now. We are using the main Sassafras book because it has more of a storyline where they travel the globe and study animals, then the following week, I add Emily's items on (rotating between the two). I pick my own art from youtube or elsewhere and also dont do the cookbook either. I may add my own recipe here and there. So, we will see how it goes. Honestly, if I didnt have Sassafras already, I would just stick with Emily's stuff, but the kids like the story aspect, so it works. I am very excited for Lvl 1 though and plan to follow it a little more closely than I did this year. I love history, so I have high expectations. We also use TGTB Language Arts and Math with this to round it out.

hi there great review! I was wondering if it was expensive for you to print out the program. ? thank you!
as for knowing which books to buy I'm guessing sticking to the spines?
and get the rest from the library?
choosing what to use makes me stressed. I was going to go by the Ambleside booklist but then this also looks great. so hard to decide. I don't want to be overwhelmed with too many readalouds (chapter books).
anyway I'm glad I found your videos.

Homeschooling is so much fun! My son and I are passed this stage, but it's fun to see other homeschoolers using reading in their curricula. 👍📚❤

Hi, is there any chance that you can show us a closer look at your version of the schedule? Thank you so much!

Oh wow! Great review! I could never do homeschooling (I just don’t have the patience for it) but that sounds like an awesome book! I definitely think I will check it out and see if I can help my son with reading and find new books for our nightly reads. He is in kindergarten this year, so we log our daily reading and get a prize if we reach a certain number of minutes read each month.

Super fun!! We're using Torchlight Kindergarten, but I did tie in some books/activities from BYL. Are you planning on using BYL level 1? I'm planning on blending Torchlight and BYL 1 again, but I can't decide which I use as a base! They're both so good!!

This looks amazing! Did you have the pdf printed and bound? If so, where and about how much did it cost? Thank you so much?

Thank you for this great review! I'm thinking of starting our homeschooling journey (combined with world travel) in 3 years from now at which time my kids will be 3.5, 5, and 7. I am researching well in advance and I'm interested in this curriculum. Do you think my kids' ages are close enough that they could all use the same level?

Did you use other curriculums to supplement math, grammar, etc? I love the idea of BYL for level 0, but I'm worried about the hassle of having to supplement so many other subjects.

What type of audiobook resources do you use ? I would love to start that for quiet time.

I can not wait to start level 0 with my daughter this fall! 😊

Didn’t work for us because our library didn’t have a lot and I spent way more than I should have on the books. Also, like you, I didn’t follow the schedule so buying and printing it seemed like a waste. Also didn’t care for the activities. I loved the idea behind it, but it didn’t work out practically. I understood the big picture of the continents but after such a long time of doing it, my kids lost the general idea and it seemed like a mash of subjects. There wasn’t a simple way to review things as you went to make sure information was retained.
It could totally work for other families, we just decided it was not for us in the future.

Loving your channel! Would you be interested in sharing your printout per continent? I would gladly share proof of purchase!

If we're doing BYL 0 as our core, then Logic of English Foundations and Math WIth Confidence/RightStart Math would you still add in some sort of fun science?

Would you still recommend this for a 5 year old all these years later?