I am new to Tapestry and will starting in a couple of weeks. I purchased Y1U2 and have spent the last week or so pouring over the material and I very excited to get started.

I have five children ages 11,8,5,3,and a 8 month old. All are girls except for the 3 yr old who is my precious little boy. So, I will be teaching at LG, UG, and at the Dialetic level. As I have been looking things over, I do have a couple of questions that I am hoping someone could help me with.

1)How do you structure your days with Tapestry? You have assignment sheets to fill out, reading, writing, geography, discussions to conduct, response pages or diagrams for students to fill out and hands-on activities. Am I missing anything?

2)I will be using Writing Aids and I put my CD in and it is not working. My computer is trying to read it but can't. Has anyone had a similar problem?

Thanks in advance!

Hi and welcome to TOG!

It sounds like you might be a little overwhelmed with how to fit everything in - maybe I can help a little bit by showing how we to Tapestry, even though my boys are at a different stage than your children.

We've scheduled a half hour on Monday morning for "planning time". That's when I give the boys their own copies of the student activity sheets, we read through the introduction (on the first page of the SA sheets) together, review their reading assignments for the week and anything else that might be coming up (field trips, etc.).

On Monday, Wednesday and Friday we work on writing for an hour, on Tuesday and Thursday we do grammar and vocabulary.

Then from 10:30 on we do other subjects not covered in TOG - math, Latin, music, science, etc.

In the afternoon, starting around 2:00 we go back to our TOG subjects - on Monday we do timeline and geography, Tuesday we do Pageant of Philosophy (could be hands-on time for younger ones), Wednesday is Church History, Thursday is Art and/or Music history or appreciation. If one of those three subjects (Tuesday through Thursday) doesn't have anything scheduled for that week we just skip it. Then on Friday afternoon we wrap it all up with our discussion time for the week.

On Monday through Thursday we do reading (both history reading and literature) for the rest of the afternoon until the day's assigned reading is done (usually the boys look at their week's reading on Monday morning and divide it between the four days - I only require that they finish it by the time we do our discussion on Friday afternoon).

I hope this helps even a little bit as you tackle the job of sorting it all out for your family!

Thank you, Jan. It sounds like you are very busy! I think it does take some time to figure out how to do all of this. I am trying to feel to pressured but to relax and go slowly. I do feel that this curriculum is an answer to my prayers. I have tried just about everything and Tapestry seems to be very flexible to where you don't feel guilty if you don't do all of it. How long have you used Tapestry? Do you use Writing Aids?