This is my first year using TOG and I'm nervous! What does your day look like? I will have students in 3 different levels. Do you just hand the children their books and have them read? Do you read to them? When do you do the activities? Do you sit and discuss what they've read as a group or individually?

Thank you for any advice you can give me!

Blessings,

Janelle

Hi Janelle,
Please know that these nervous feelings are NORMAL and will go away. We just finished our first year of TOG so I know those feelings well. I can always rest in the truth that God has led our family to home school and therefore HE WILL PROVIDE all that we need, including wisdom.
There are many ways to set up your day, and each individual family will have their own way of doing it. THere are suggestions on the Loom on scheduling and how to set up your day. You could start there to give you and idea. I am currently homeschooling only one of my daughters, she will be in 10th grade. At that level, she decides in what order she wants to do her subjects. We have our discussion day on Thurday where we go over the questions in TOG for both Literature and History. We read History together, but that is just how we do it, it's not required. It helps me to know and understand the history better since that is a week area for me, then we can discuss as we go along.
Also remember there is MUCH more in TOG then you could ever complete in a week, so image it like a Buffet when you go out to eat. You wouldn't put everything you see on your plate, you would pick the most important, protein, veggie, fruit, bread, etc. Same thing with TOG,
History and Literature readings are your protein,of course writing is very important as well, you get the idea.
If you could join a coop, I would highly recommend it. That helped us SO much to have a group of people to bounce questions off of and to get help from.
I hope this helps. Blessings on your homeschool year. YOu will do GREAT!
Bonnie

Yes, I would love to hear this question answered also. I have children at all levels and a toddler. I have tried and tried to wrap my brain around how to make my days work. I can get it to all look good on paper but I know from experience it has to be "doable" for the whole year or I will just burn out.

Hi Quiverfull,

I know you're a first-time TOG user (or possibly not yet, not sure) just from reading your other posts on here. I'm also a first-timer, for TOG as well as homeschool in general! Anyway, if you have more questions, you can go to the yahoo group called TOGLooseThreads. I just recently joined myself, but there are a lot of ladies there that can answer your questions also. Plus they have posted all kinds of files, including schedules, work samples, etc. that would maybe help answer your questions as well. I have asked quite a few over there and pretty much always get a response. Hope this helps!

- Diana

Thank you Diana. I lurk there daily

I just finished my first year of TOG with a LG and an UG. I also have three others under the age of 5 so we kept mornings mostly independent work - my girls did their math and history reading on their own with me around to help if needed. Afternoons (when the three little ones were resting) were spent on History twice a week and Science twice a week. That's when we did our mapwork, activities, etc. depending on the week. I did not do an activity every week. I also read the UG spine outloud during these two days so I was involved a little bit more in what they were learning.

Grammar and handwriting were done on their own while I read to the little ones before rest. This ended up giving my older ones free time from about 11:00 to 1:00 which was important to me because I want them to be able to interact with their younger siblings.

Obviously what works for one may not work for others but maybe just hearing how others do things can help.

Janelle
You did not mention the three levels of your TOG students but I am guessing they are dialectic, upper grammar and lower grammar.

I only do discussions with my dialectic students and that discussion time is once a week for an hour at the very most.

The dialectic student should be reading on their own, so yes, you should be handing them their weekly assignments. Help this student to break the assignment down into daily work. The Student activity pages and questions are so that YOU know they have done the reading and understood it. It may take several weeks for the student to work well independently and be able to answer the questions well, especially the thinking questions but hang in there. You are teaching this student to work independently and you are both learning to use the Socratic method of question and answer.

I would not worry so much about discussion with the grammar level children. If it were me I would be doing the reading to my lower grammar student OR I would ask my upper grammar student to read to their sibling. Then I would spend some time with these children one day a week or once every two weeks working on a hands on project. This I would definitely do together including my dialectic student. You can select projects that everyone can work on together (such as one salt map) and sometimes children can work on their own project. Sometimes this can be a good opportunity while working on projects to talk about the history of the week. Sometimes not.

I think the key here is to NOT spread yourself too thin trying to do all things for three children in three age groups. I would spend time in the beginning of the year making sure my dialectic student is on their way to learning and working independently. That way you will only need to focus on the Tapestry work of this student about one to two hours per week by correcting papers, teaching writing and hold short discussions.

Once you are confident this student is moving forward you can focus on what you want to do with your grammar level students. You could begin your discussion time with all three students by simply hitting the concrete facts first for about 15 minutes, then dismissing those students and spending the rest of your time with your dialectic student. Talking about connections and going through the discussion outline with grammar students will be an overload for them.

My day by the way is primarily spent with my lower grammar student. I spend one on one time with her doing math and language. We spend about one hour a week total doing the Tapestry history and literature reading. I try to do a three or four hands on projects PER UNIT. I have three older children and I don't have time to do lots of hands on. Some units I haven't done any at all. Since my children are in dialectic and rhetoric, they get their assignments on Monday and they work independently until Thursday when we have our history discussion. That takes me about an hour or an hour and a half. On Friday we have literature discussion which takes about the same amount of time. So for Mon, Tues and Wed. I don't do a lot of Tapestry with my older children.

Hope this helps...I think I rambled a bit. Sorry!

Lisa in AZ

Thank you all so much for your help!! Lisa, you answered with what I was looking for. Thank you to all of you for blessing me by responding. It's hard to be new to TOG and trying to figure this all out on my own.

I did join the Yahoo group but it's so active! I can't keep up!

Blessings,
Janelle

Lisa thank you for your answer! I was just peeking into this forum with a knot in my stomach because I'm anxious about starting TOG on Monday. Your description of your week really calmed my nerves. I know I'm being ridiculous, but in 11 years of homeschooling I have never been this nervous about starting a curriculum. Maybe it's the money investment or the time. I don't know, but it's nice to see it's not as big of a deal as I'm making it out to be.

Ladies
I am so glad that you have been helped by my posts. Marcia Somerville said something to me at our convention that I heartily agree with. Tapestry is a curriculum that cannot be truly explained. You really need to get into it and DO it. Then you will begin to find what works for YOU and YOUR children. LOOKING at Tapestry is not the same as DOING Tapestry.

Keeping praying and the Lord will lead you. And you are going to love the journey! I have!

Lisa in AZ