Planning for Tapestry of Grace Year 1

This is our first year using TOG and I am super excited to have found this program. It is so thorough and engaging for the entire family. The book selections are fantastic! They are colorful and entertaining and hold my boys attention longer than 5 minutes. I have one boy in Upper Grammar, one in Dialectic and one in preschool that will listen along with us.

As a new user of TOG, I feel completely overwhelmed by the amount of papers involved. I am one of those people that reads everything and then writes notes and reads again. Good thing I love history or I would drive myself insane. I made myself a Key Discussion Outline so that I can take notes as I read. I keep this in front of my Master Binder so that I can glance at it as needed.


TOG Key Discussion Outline

 

 Tapestry of Grace Master Binder

This is my working binder and where I keep all of the papers I need for the weekly lessons.

1) I take the entire weeks section from my big binder and transfer it to my working binder.

2) Book list.

3) This section contains the weeks vocabulary words and our review cards. I type all of the vocab words into Quizlet then print out and stick a copy in my binder and each of the boys binders. For our review work, I select 4-5 things that I want them to remember and we paste the info onto index cards. The boys review these each week and we use them for review games.

4) Reading List - I highlight each boys reading selections in different colors and make notes about any corresponding notebook pages to complete.

5) Writing List - I highlight the weeks writing assignment for my UG son.

6) This is the glossary that I printed from the Loom CD. It has all of the vocabulary definitions and gives descriptions about the important people.

7) Notebooking Pages - this section holds my Table of Contents for my notebooking pages from History Scribe and Notebookingpages.com so that I can quickly scan for narrations.

8) Evaluations and Tests - I place copies of these for the entire unit and pull out as needed.

9) Maps - this section holds all of the maps, both blank and answers, for the entire unit. I pull them out at the beginning of each week and add to the boys binders.

That is my TOG Master Binder and for now, it is working great. But this is our first year, so I am sure it will be tweaked as we go along!

 

 

Organizing the Boys Tapestry of Grace Binders

We have always used binders for our history work and as much as I love the bound notebooks that a lot of others are making, I feel the boys will do better if I keep it consistent and stick with what has been working for us. So here is a look at how I organize our Tapestry notebooks.

 

I place their student assignment page at the front of the binder.

 

The next tab contains the notebooking pages that they use for narrations. I place these in there as needed for the lesson.

 

The maps are next. I place the student geography sheet opposite the map so they can see them side by side.

 

The vocabulary section comes next. I print the vocab from Quizlet and then we review these orally every day.

 

This section contains their projects. I add a copy of the activity sheet and highlight their choice. If the finished project isn't on paper, then we take a picture of it and put it here.

 

This tab is for the Review Cards. After I pick the things we will memorize and review, I print out pictures for them to paste on an index card and they write a short summary.

 

The last section is for the timeline. They have a binder timeline for them to use individually and be creative with. I also print timeline figures for them to cut and paste to our wall timeline or their binder timeline.

And that concludes this weeks lesson on the TOG binders :)

My goal is to plan one unit at a time. I will use my discussion outline to plan out the week in detail and then make all of my needed copies at once. I put the current week into the binders and file the other copies in my crate, which holds my folders that are labeled from weeks 1 - 32.

This post is written by Janeen from www.sproutingtadpoles.com