Saturday, August 15, 2009

Tapestry of Grace

We started school this week. Yeah! We were anxious to start a new curriculum. The last 2 years, we have done Sonlight and thoroughly enjoyed it. Our schooling method has always a mix of Classical and Charlotte Mason and very much literature based. Sonlight was perfect in many ways. The only problem (or at least, the main one) was that it was getting difficult to teach two different cores and eventually, I would need to add a 3rd.

So, I started looking more closely at Tapestry of Grace . It allows you to teach all the different ages of kids using the same teachers guide. So Kate in 7/8th grade, Jack in 4th/5th and Mary who is just starting out will all be studying the 19th Century (We are doing year 3) having the same - or very similar focus-but reading books at their own level. It is a brilliant system really. I think Marcia Sommerville (the creator) is quite the genius. History, literature, geography, writing, church history / worldview are woven together along with the time period we are studying. High school adds in government and philosophy.

We are really loving it! This week we are studying Napoleon, the French Revolution and John Adams. It has been fascinating. Maybe I'm weird though. I LOVE History!

I am adding a link for free webinars by Marcia Sommerville. I highly recommend them for anyone - not just a Tapestry user. Enjoy!

1 comment:

Amber said...

It sounds great! When I am trying to teach mulitple kids I will definately look into this! Madison and Isaac are so spaced out that I am sure it will be hard to do Sonlight at that time. Thanks for the link - I am going to watch one now :-)