Mollie began homeschooling her oldest child using online Cyber school and then a Calvert Curriculum that was quite comprehensive. But eventually she chose Tapestry of Grace, a Christian curriculum that covers reading and writing and history, but not math and science. It is organized into a classical four-year cycle with grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric.
Tapestry of Grace can be purchased with “everything in a box,” including teachers’ manuals, overviews, goals, assessments, and all the books and materials you would need. But there is a less expensive way where you buy just folders that have guidelines for everything, guidelines of what you need, when to teach and ways to teach it, teacher’s notes and worksheets. You can either order books from Tapestry of Faith or find them in the library or book stores. It comes with a computer disk that has all of the worksheets that you can print out and it connects to a website where you can update your booklist.
Tapestry Grace includes grade levels K-12. It’s organized in four-year sections recycling three times. Notebooks for each subject include all grades, so you can do say Pride and Prejudice with Mason, and something else with Gracie in the same time period and there’s a little book for Gwenny and they’re all together in the same place doing the same time period.
Even though Mollie used Tapestry of Faith throughout most of their years of homeschooling, she found many other sources to augment and improve their program. Unhappy with the writing part of Tapestry of Faith Mollie found the Institute for Excellent in Writing (IEW). This was a highly structured writing program that intrigued Mollie and worked for at least Mason and Gracie. Mollie tells how Gracie was doing all her writing online and masking the fact that she was using all the wrong words at all the wrong times and wasn’t spelling anything correctly because she used a program with autocorrect. So, she put Gracie back on a regular spelling workbook program. With some other homeschooling families, a literature discussion group was cobbled together for Gracie and some friends. Gracie and her friends took turns organizing lessons and taking on a leadership role for the group and eventually the group added a historical element to the activity.
Another very popular writing device for Gracie was NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), an online site where one sets a writing goal for the month of November. The process often included setting up word counts per day with the ultimate goal being to complete a novel in a month. The social interaction with other girls really drew Gracie in, as it has other girls in my study, and the writing usually lasted throughout the school year.
Some other learning opportunities Mollie used were Duolingo, a language website where her kids learned different languages. She found a four-year program of great philosophers: Abraham, Confucius, Socrates, Plato etc. They read their works and had discussions with these philosophers. And when her oldest approached higher education, Mollie as well as Mason learned the ropes of online courses, both synchronous and asynchronous.
In a culture where we have come to rely on schools to educate our children, it is comforting to wake up each morning, assemble your children around the kitchen table, pull out a sheaf of papers that represent a well-researched, organized approach to teaching children much like the traditional schools use, and begin teaching. And as we see with Mollie, a homeschooling mom, dealing with only a handful of children, it’s hard not to change things around to fit better.
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