Preparing Tapestry: our Fourth Year

We are headed into our fourth year of our Tapestry of Grace curriculum, which means we will have completed the cycle at the end of this year. (It also means this is my last year of all grammar level.) Last year, I felt like we really made Tapestry our own and found our rhythm, our stride. It felt good, like a fitted glove. Of course, when you end a year like that, it makes planning the next year exciting. I love the aspect of homeschooling where I trouble-shoot and research and find our answers, but the Lord knew I would…

Update on our Tapestry changes

While I love our Tapestry of Grace curriculum, I mentioned at the beginning of the year that I totally overhauled Tapestry. I arranged our year by topics rather than by week (think of the Unit Study concept); I arranged our year into 3 Terms rather than 4 units; and I only did history the first two Terms (our last term branches into more science and biographies of scientists and inventors.) With all of that going down, I wanted to check in and let you all know how our Tapestry changes turned out. The update is that, this year (drum roll………) our…

Homeschooling Simplicity: Simplifying Tapestry

I’m trying to achieve simplicity for the rest of this year and the upcoming year, to give my kids a quality education while allowing us to live life, the life God’s given us. I’ve been tackling several different areas of our homeschool where I felt the pressure getting a little out of hand, one of those has been our integrated history studies through Tapestry of Grace. Because Tapestry includes plans for all twelve grades and ideas for all the learning styles, it can easily become too much if you try to do it all. It’s meant to be a buffet,…

Planning Tapestry (and free planner page)

The last couple of months, I’ve spent getting familiar with Tapestry, looking over all of our options, listening to the Pop Quiz CDs (audio summaries of each week designed to keep Dad in the loop), making out mock schedules, and haunting the forums. The chief obstacle is how to fit all this goodness into a single week! Over and over again, the advice is to select off the buffet of Tapestry and to NOT try to do it all. But even with my selections, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to enjoy it all! Which is why I’ve…

Bonding with Tapestry

While I waited to be able to use Tapestry with my children, I greedily devoured any blog post I could google on the topic. And in the last two years, I’ve really been blessed with a wealth of terrific advice on getting started. In some small sense, I hardly feel like a rookie. As I click on my DE plans, I hear the myriad voices coaching me through what to look at and which elements to notice. Of course, the “Teacher Training” DVDs helped immensely as well, as Marcia Somerville talked me through the philosophy and set-up of Tapestry. For…

Unpacking Tapestry

The day has finally, finally come. After two years of biding my time and patiently preparing… I am finally unpacking my first year’s plans of Tapestry of Grace. I first discovered Tapestry when my son was just getting ready for K4, and immediately knew that this was exactly what we wanted from our homeschool experience: the classical education, the whole-family learning approach, the strong emphasis on Bible and church history. I drooled over every free sample they posted, and we waited for the day when my son could read—k4, kindergarten, and now first grade approaches. Eek! My heart absolutely raced…

Middle School Homeschool Curriculum Favorites

This homeschool year, I have two of my kids in middle school—6th grade and 8th grade. To say I was nervous about these transitions would be an understatement. Though I definitely miss the lower elementary years of crafts and messy projects, adventurous learning and cozy read-alouds, these years of growth and independence and deep conversations have been a blast as well. I actually love homeschooling my middle schoolers. And while settling on homeschool curriculum for middle school has been a little bit of trial and error, I’m pretty happy with how our year has wrapped up.