Antioch Cottage School: June 2008

I finally decided to go ahead and start. I'm finally going to be joining the proud ranks of the Tapestry of Grace homeschoolers. I ordered most everything we'll need for our first unit a few days ago. I have already gotten my first shipment of books (even though there were only two in this one) and very soon I should be able to start planning for our next school year (which will start in the first week of August). This is something I have been wanting to do for a long time, and I am thrilled at how things have worked out.
So that you'll understand my thought process and the circumstances that brought me to this place, let me go back to the beginning of the story and give you a little background. Over the years since I read and fell in love with the first edition of The Well-Trained Mind, I have frequently noticed vague references to TOG from classical homeschooling enthusiasts on the net. For a long time I didn't pay much attention to them because I was planning to use the WTM recommendations for history and I didn't know enough about TOG to think that it could help me in that pursuit. Once we began homeschooling and theory gave way to the reality of practice, I quickly became overwhelmed by the amount of work this style of teaching was taking for all of us. Many days we would start school in the morning and still be doing school when it was dark outside. Just about every subject was taking them longer than expected and even then they often just didn't seem to "get it". On the planning end, I was floundering on the amount of choices that I had in the content areas and it was very difficult for me to decide what was most important to cover. As a result, I was probably overloading them with work. In the skill areas, I really struggled to match the level of work with what they could handle. So I probably overwhelmed them on that end, too. I loved TWTM's philosopy of education (and I still do), but the successful application of the philosopy was evading me. We had some bright spots (they loved the hands-on projects and the living books in the content areas), but on the whole, the kids were reluctant and I was discouraged, and I realized we needed a change.
For about 2 years, that change came in the form of a private Christian school. They got along fairly well there, I suppose, and I even worked as a teacher there for about a year. But somewhere in my soul, deeper than I could put into words, and I suppose deeper even than I was fully conscious of at the time, I could sense that I wouldn't be able to settle for this. I couldn't let go of my dream of homeschooling, and I became restless. Due in a large part to this dissatisfaction with the educational circumstances of our family, teaching at the school lost its appeal and I moved on to the job I have now at the hospital. The kids remained at the school at first, but one by one over the next couple of years they decided to come back home to school.
I knew this time around we would have to do things a little differently. What we had done before didn't work for us. So we just relaxed for a while. We used textbooks/workbooks for the very basics, and covered the rest with good books and educational movies. This sufficed as a temporary fix, and is actually close to what we are doing to this day. Still, I never lost my love for TWTM, and after several months of our relaxed schedule, I began to put in a lot of time looking for curricula that would allow me to accomplish my original goals without overwhelming the kids or getting bogged down in my own planning. I like to tweak, but I am a major perfectionist, and tweaking gets me into trouble if I'm not very careful. I started to realize that I would need a lot of structure in order to be my best and healthiest as a teacher.
It was during this time that I first learned about TOG in earnest. I was surfing the web one day doing some research on history curricula when I found an article and audio presentation on the Knowledge Quest website that compared several different history programs. One of the programs discussed was TOG. The things I heard about it really intrigued me and so I went to the TOG website to learn more. After only a few minutes on the website I was amazed. I couldn't believe the things I was seeing and reading. This was exactly what I was looking for! Here before me was a 4-year chronological history program that incorporated geography, literature, writing, fine arts and many other subjects into an intricate and long range unit study that was rich with classical rigor and filtered beautifully through a Christian worldview. Realizing all of this, I saw TOG as my path to accomplish the goals that TWTM had formed in me long before, and in a manner that was more spiritually rich than I had even hoped for. Praise God that he always exceeds our expectations!
After that day, generally speaking, the question was no longer WHAT I would use, but WHEN I would begin. I went ahead and bought everything I would need to start Year 1 Redesigned the next school year (2008-2009). We had been casually studying 20th century history this school year in preparation. However, I had this nagging feeling that Princess wouldn't really be ready by the start of the upcoming school year to get the full benefit of a grammar stage rotation, and I didn't want her to miss out. I knew that the boys would have to do a partial rotation of the program at some point no matter when we started, so I had mainly based my timeframe decisions on Princess, as she WAS still young enough to get the full benefit of the program. Add to that the fact that I had decided recently to wait 2 years to "officially" start 1st grade with Princess, and I pretty much came to the conclusion that I would need to wait 2 years to start TOG. The only problem was that this would leave me, for the next two years, once again without a solid plan for the kids' education. I considered several things, such as Sonlight, the Robinson Curriculum, a modified version of Ambleside Online, or even continuing on with what we had been doing. Then, one day a couple of weeks ago, I had a revelation. I was browsing the TOG website and looking at the new Year 3 products they've put on there (drooling over them would probably be more accurate!) and I got to thinking about a suggestion I had gotten from the WTM message boards that I could start TOG with Princess in the fall without overwhelming her if I did it in a fashion that was very relaxed. I also got to thinking about how the fact of Princess starting 1st grade a year later changed our time frame for starting Year 1. This new time frame would mean that all four year plans would be complete before we started year 1, as year 3 would be coming out this upcoming school year. Then I got to thinking about how kids in the public schools usually started history with American history. I realized that if I started with unit 3 of Year 2, I could get through most of the traditional American history progression by the time we would start Year 1 in two years. I found the idea that Princess would have some common historical knowledge with her public-schooled peers attractive, but I still didn't know how to start her in TOG now without it affecting her future years with TOG.
Then it dawned on me. Something that had been right in front of my face the whole time. There were actually FOUR levels of TOG! As I knew from the time I had spent with the Year 1 materials I had obtained, the book selections for the lower grammar and the upper grammar levels are almost entirely different. The only thing that really overlapped much was the geography, which I could easily wait until 1st grade to start. I had here a ready supply of history readings, literature readings, and arts and crafts activities that I could use while still basically leaving three intact levels to use for her formal school years. As Princess had already begun to read short-vowel readers, and had been progressing nicely in her reading skill, I felt confident that she would be able to read the upper grammar book selections within 2 years. Even if she didn't completely make it by that time, I could read the upper grammar books to her just as easily as the lower grammar books until she was able to read them completely on her own. I could also incorporate the boys very easily into this progression, and this would give them back the things they had enjoyed in our first attempt at classical education in a way that could easily be matched to their abilities and that would take away the planning stress for me. And we could have all this NOW, instead of having to wait two years to gain all these benefits.
At this point in my thinking, the decision was pretty much a no-brainer, so I'm sure you have guessed that I decided to act on this plan, which is exactly what I did. When the upcoming school year begins in August, we will start Unit 3 of Year 2, which roughly coincides with the traditional starting point of American history study. Hopefully, by the end of the school year, we will have reached the end of Unit 2 of Year 3. This should allow us to come to the end of Unit 2 of Year 4 at the culmination of the two years we have to spend before starting Year 1, allowing us to cover almost all of the major events of American history in that time. Below is a rough description of my plans for the upcoming school year for TOG and the other subjects I plan for us to cover (although the subjects not covered by TOG are still a bit tentative):

Princess:
TOG - lower grammar history and literature selections, lower grammar hands-on activities and maybe an occasional lower grammar evaluation.
Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading
The Family Readers
maybe a phonics workbook
Reason for Handwriting K
Write On! Printing DVD Tutor Kit
RightStart Math A
Sonlight Science P4/5
nature walks regularly
the rest of Sonlight's P4/5 book selections for extra reading
the Developing the Early Learner series
a few picture books from the library for fun and as an opportunity to develop familiarity with the library and what it has to offer
Bible Study Guide For All Ages updated Beginner Level, Unit 1
Memlok Bible memory system
Classical Magic in some fashion

Joker:
TOG upper grammar
Exploring Creation with Botany incorporating the WTM grammar stage science suggestions
nature walks regularly
Simply Spelling or Sequential Spelling
Writing With Ease (start at the beginning and accelerate as tolerated)
First Language Lessons (start at the beginning and accelerate as tolerated)
Harp and Laurel Wreath memory work, as well as TWTM grammar stage memory suggestions in the various subjects
RightStart Math B (accelerate as tolerated)
Prima Latina
Atelier Art (may supplement the art appreciation component somewhat with Harmony Fine Arts grammar stage selections)
Classical Magic in some fashion
Bible Study Guide for All Ages updated Intermediate Level, Unit 1
Memlok Bible memory system

MelloYello:
TOG dialectic
Exploring Creation with Botany incorporating the WTM logic stage science selections
nature walks regularly
Simply Spelling or Sequential Spelling
Writing With Ease (start at the beginning and accelerate as tolerated)
First Language Lessons (start at the beginning and accelerate as tolerated)
Harp and Laurel Wreath memory work, as well as TWTM logic stage memory suggestions in the various subjects
RightStart Math B (accelerate as tolerated)
Prima Latina
Atelier Art (may supplement the art appreciation component somewhat with Harmony Fine Arts logic stage selections)
Classical Magic in some fashion
Bible Study Guide for All Ages updated Intermediate or Advanced Level, Unit 1
Memlok Bible memory system

I have covered every subject, I think, but I'm still a little afraid this may be too much in the non-TOG sujects . I'd like to know what all of you think about this, as well as the rest of the post. Feel free to comment.

Antioch Cottage School

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