We are starting Tapestry of Grace Year 3 next week! At the end of last year I did some thinking about our accomplishments for the year and one of the things we didn’t do very well was history. (That’s really an understatement. But I did have a baby, so I’m trying to be generous.) I thought about trying a new history curriculum, but I kept coming back to TOG. I love the way it integrates history with literature, Bible/Church History, and geography. I like the hands-on activity ideas. But I really had failed to implement it well in our home last year. (Honestly, we hadn’t done so well the year before either.)
So I made a deal with myself (and my husband). Before I went looking for a different curriculum for us, I was going to give TOG one more shot. A really good shot. I was going to plan, plan, plan this summer. I was going to get EVERYTHING figured out ahead of time. I wanted to do this because it certainly had not worked as a “pick up and go” curriculum for us.
But, summer has a way of flying by. I blinked and it was August. It was time to get serious about this planning stuff. I have been working hard this week, and I am very happy to report that I have thoroughly prepared for Unit 1. Here is what I’ve done.
(I purchased the Digital Edition (DE) for the first time this year. These steps include printing the pages I desired to have printed.)
1. Read through the Year Introduction.
2. Made a spreadsheet with all the resources used in year 3. (Downloaded from the website.)
3. Highlighted all the books on the list that I already owned.
4. Went through the list again and checked the on-line library catalog highlighting all the books from the list available from the library.
5. Printed the Teaching Objective, Weekly Overview, and Reading Assignment pages for every week of the year plan.
6. Placed all of the above in sheet protectors.
7. Read through the Weekly Overview and Reading Assignment pages with Sharpie in hand, marking the books that we had or could borrow from the library.
8. Determined which resources we should buy. Marked those on the pages.
Starting here, I’ve just done the first unit.
9. Went through each week in Unit 1 and typed the reading assignments I have selected for my dialectic students. (Yes, they could just use the notebook, but I use some alternate resources, and throw in some upper grammar assignments instead of dialectic ones so it can get confusing.)
10. Cut and pasted the assignments and relevant questions (adding space to write the answers) from the student assignment pages into the same document as the reading list. Printed out copies of the list for each student.
11. Printed page 1 of the Student Assignment pages for the first 9 weeks.
12. Printed the maps for the weeks that we are using them.
13. Printed the Lower grammar literature worksheets that we are using.
Phew.
That’s where I sit. I need to decide how to store all the pre-printed papers. I don’t want to 3-hole punch the maps, so I’m not sure what I’ll end of doing with those.
That’s my Wrap-up for this week! Be sure to visit Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers for more weekly reports.
By Kristen H.
That pre-prep is so worth it I think but it is time consuming. Glad to follow a fellow TOGer!
Good for you for sticking with what you already have…that’s been weighing heavy on my heart recently! I’ve been seriously trying to “plan” as well but everytime…and I mean EVERYTIME…I sit down to do it I’m interrupted. I did get the library books today so I feel like I’m a step closer! LOL
Sounds like you got a wonderful start on the year! I’m feeling very excited for our TOG year.
Wow! That’s a lot of planning! Hopefully this year will work better for you. For the maps what I did last year was putting them in sheet protectors and filing them in a binder. When we were using it I would simply open the binder to the map we were looking at at the moment, and the other ones where right there as well if we needed to look back at something.
Do you know what exactly has been preventing you for using TOG to its fullest? Just wondering if anything I did (do) can help.
We are doing TOG for the first time this year. It sure did involve more planning than I have every had before with all my eclectic curricula. Having a baby during the school year is a huge deal, don’t beat yourself up too badly. The year my hubby was deployed and I was pregnant, I seriously considered sending the kids off to school because I was just wiped out!! Babies require lots of mommy attention 😉 Please be gracious to yourself.
I wish I could see how the DE was laid out. What if you put the maps in page protectors in binders??? We got a ton of free binders from hubby’s work so that is the route we went for organization. Hey, free right??? 😉
You’re doing better than I am. We’re also sticking with TOG For 3 of my students at the moment. Younger ones returned to FIAR and one of my teens is using other curriculums that are more self-contained. Anyway, I’m not as together as you are for TOG, and we started last week.
April
By the way, you won the Carmex giveaway! Email me your address and I’ll pass it on to Carmex. 😀
What a great job you have done planning for the first unit! I wish I were that organized. I got the first three weeks assignments figured out and printed up. I read (not thoroughly) through the unit overview, I requested books at the library for the first few weeks, then discovered that a few I thought we had had gone missing. I will need to get the next 2-3 weeks figured out this weekend. I’m not nearly as organized as you are. I think your year will go better than mine! 😉
Looks like you are well prepared! Can’t wait to read about how it goes. I’m a new follower from the TOS blog hop.