In the past few weeks I've been working hard to finalize our plans for the new school year, and changing my mind about a million times in the process. Shortly after my last post, I made the decision to scrap the bulk of my plans for history and use Tapestry of Grace instead. The TOG plans were surprisingly similar to my own, but helped fill in some of the gaps I'd been struggling with, so I think they'll be a good fit for us. I'm hoping that I've finally found a history program that we can stick with!

I am a bit concerned that so much history is covered in TOG Year 2, it moves quite a lot faster than I'd wanted. Nevertheless, I'm going to take it one unit at a time and see how things go, adjusting our pace as needed. We'll need to start out with Year 1, Unit 4 - in order to study Ancient Rome - before moving on to Year 2. And, I've got a few plans for history that I'm not willing to relinquish (such as a medieval garden project), so I'll be trying to work those in as we go along.

With our curricula for the year more or less established, I've been searching for ways to better organize myself. Organization is something that I've struggled with for years, and between working full-time and homeschooling this year, I realized that it's going to be important for my sanity to have a better system in place! My first step (aside from ordering Managers of Their Homes, which I still need to read), was inspired by Dawn at By Sun and Candlelight - I set up a file crate system. In my file crate thus far, I've got a folder for each month of the year, a planning calendar and weekly folders for each week of TOG Year 1, Unit 4. I'll be adding additional folders for the remaining weeks as I plan them. To spare myself a great deal of stress and confusion, I've decided to plan out one TOG unit at a time!

I haven't decided exactly how the system will work yet, but currently each folder contains the TOG weekly overview, along with the reading list and printables (worksheets, notebooking pages, additional reading, etc.) for the week. I've supplemented with printables from other sources, in addition to those provided by TOG. I'll be adding project ideas as I find them and have an index to the weeks typed up in Word. I'm thinking I'll pull and copy the printables as I do my planning each week so that the kids can add them to their binders as we go. This seemed a better option than handing them a pre-filled binder at the beginning of the year.

The monthly folders contain seasonal and liturgical ideas for the month - crafts, recipes, reading lists, etc. I'm hoping that this will enable me to incorporate these activities on a regular basis because it's something we all enjoy very much.