To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven
-Ecclesiastes 3:1
Spring is in the air!
It is another beautiful day at our house!
I have been praying and seeking diligently for some time now, about our next year's course we should take. I have needed to take into consideration a few things:
- All of my kiddos are ready for me to encourage them to take on more challenging work
- We have embarked on our dream to have a small animal farm (we now have chickens, and plan on goats in the future). This means that we will have other projects to focus some of our time on. Including:
- 4-H....we have begun participating in 4-H projects and are very excited for all that this program has to offer us!
- Scouting- Ephraim has officially joined the Cub Scout program, so he (we) will have additional projects and meetings to attend.
- Gardening/Canning.....we WILL be doing our very first at our house this year.
- A possible addition to our family......yes we are beginning to think: baby
All of these things are going to require more TIME of one particular person in our family...can you guess who? ME
So I have been desiring to find a curriculum guide that COMBINES as much as possible together, that gives me a lesson plan (that is easily adapted when wanted), and covers our age levels of at least 7 years to 11, with emphasis on being able to challenge the oldest to strive harder and higher. I wanted all of our reading, writing, vocabulary, spelling, to be inter-linked with our History lessons. I wanted it to follow our CM (Charolette Mason) style of doing things with living books and short lessons. I wanted more time to create fun games and projects to support our lessons and to be able to give some devoted time to preschoolers.
Is this even possible?
A couple weeks ago after putting the kids to bed. I was sitting on the computer doing internet searches for Literature-based curriculum. I found a lot of great things...but a lot of them required me to make the book list and plan out the unit studies. I would love to be able to sit down and do that...one of my favorite things is to come up with our lesson plans and find exciting new ways to learn. But based on my above list, I feel my time is better spent teaching and not planning. I want to be able to have fun with the kiddos, not spend hours on the computer researching or creating.
And then I stumbled upon this:
I watched the several introductory videos on the site, and as I did a warm sensation spread throughout me. I thought: This is it! But then my brain said: Hold on...you need to research this more, there is nothing worse than getting something that doesn't work for you family.
The hour was growing late and my eyes were bleary so I forced myself to pin it and wait for the next day to read more. When I got the chance the next day, I sat down and opened my homeschool pin board to find the link to the website. There I found someone had made a comment: We are in our 5 year of TOG and we love it! I immediately replied asking her questions. She responded promptly telling me about the age range of her kids and that her 16 yo was graduating this year. That was all I needed to inspire me to dig deeper.
This is what I found:
- The creator was a homeschool mom (and dad) of 6
- It was created because she wanted a way to spend more time teaching and less time planning, and she wanted her children to be instructed in the most important lessons of all...CHRIST.
- The company put 3 weeks of lesson plans and other resources on their site for FREE for us to explore and try out before purchase.
- The Core of the program is History taken from 4 divisions of World History. (The same way we already began doing it this year..with The story of the World history program.) Starting with Ancient Times. It also has a strong focus of tying history into events taken from the Bible.
- Each Year contains 4 units, which can be purchased separately, which makes it easy to start at anytime with in your other course of study.
- There is a print, digital, or combination of program material.
- Each lesson plan contains lessons from elementary through Highschool levels, which are broke up into levels and not grades. They are: lower grammar, upper grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric
- There is great flexibility of levels being taught and it is supper easy to give a student a challenging assignment from a level above without changing their whole lesson level. And it works the same for giving an easier assignment to a student who is struggling in a certain area like writing or reading, without messing up the other lessons.
- The only areas of study it doesn't cover is Math, Science, and any specialties like foreign languages or Music studies. There is even play scripts so you can put on a play just as a family or in a co-op (oh yeah, it has lots of info on how to use it in a co-op).
- There are lots of hands on projects available to do.
- The book list consists of books that are easily found on the internet or at the library. They also have a book store where you can go to purchase the books on the list if you don't want to shop around or borrow.
Are you loving it yet?
I am!
This program is truly an answer to my prayers!
So I ordered a couple Units from Year 1 which fits in with our current study of Ancient Times for us to begin right away and test out to see if it works for us and if it will work for us for our whole year program.
I have received the package and poured over the material this week....so far I think it looks great! We will begin to implement the program next week.
I was not invited to give this review and I did not receive anything for it. I simply liked what I saw and wanted to share my opinion. If there was anything in my notes that was not accurate..I apologize and please let me know so that I can correct it.
I will try to give an updated review after we have used the program for a week or two.
Happy Day!
