Tapestry of Grace: Weeks 1-8 of Year 4

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We have had a wonderful time using Tapestry of Grace this year! It’s really what I needed to help us with some structure and accountability. I feel like our homeschool is going smoother than it has in years! (Of course, I’m not pregnant or nursing–for the first time ever since I started homeschooling 13 years ago–so that probably makes a difference, too!)

We are studying the 20th Century and using our studies of humanities around that framework. Here are some of the things the kids have done, read, and studied so far:

Literature:

My middle school boys have read and discussed with their Fellowship Group Call of the Wild, Stories of O. Henry, Anne of Green Gables, and Robert Frost Poetry.

I have read to the younger kids The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Beatrix Potter books, Raggedy Ann stories, Pollyanna (Porter), When We Were Very Young (A.A. Milne), and Peter Pan.

On her own my 6th grade daughter has read Five Children and It and The Girl of the Limberlost.

History:

We’ve studied about Theodore Roosevelt, the Wright brothers, Henry Ford, President Taft, Titanic, San Francisco Earthquake, President Wilson, World War 1, Flu Epidemic of 1917, prohibition, women get the vote, President Harding, FDR, and The Jazz Age.

The kids have done some fun and educational group activities at the Fellowship Group (based on their age): reenacting a Ford car assembly line:

making a submarine out of clay (middle school), making a submarine out of water bottles (preschool):

writing a radio commercial script, voting activity, timeline activities and games, and geography activities. One of the activities my elementary kids most enjoyed was doing some of the spy activities from World War 1. I just love the teachers and all they are doing to provide such wonderful learning experiences for my kids!

Here is my son with his World War 1 bag that he used when reenacting trench warfare (the black balloon is a grenade):

I love how the kids are still studying history with “Living Books” as well as some that are more textbook-like. The middle school kids have read Modern History in Pictures (Mills), Popular Culture 1900-1919 (Hunt), Bully for You Teddy Roosevelt (Fritz), Our Living Constitution (Aten), The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (Schaefer), The World Wars (Dowswell), Unraveling Freedom (Bausom), Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Freedman), Women’s Right to Vote (Landau), Temperance and Prohibition (Bauer), and Stalin (McCollum).

My elementary kids have read Welcome to Samantha’s World (1904), An Age of Extremes (Hakim), Kids at Work: Lewis Hine and the Crusade Against Child Labor (Freedman), The Story of the Wright Brothers and Their Sister, The Legend of the Teddy Bear (Murphy), Where Poppies Grow: A World War 1 Companion (Granfield), World War 1 (Adams), Louis Armstrong and the Jazz Age (Elish), War Peace and All That Jazz (Hakim), and The 1920’s Decade in Photos (Corrigan).

Music Appreciation:

I’m am having a ball teaching the music history/appreciation class at our Tapestry of Grace Fellowship Group! So far we have studied and listened to music from Debussy, Ravel, Opera (Puccini, Menotti, Gershwin), Ragtime (Joplin), Marches (Sousa), Stride Piano, Blues and Jazz (Armstrong and Ellington), and Mahler. I also taught a short lesson on Hymns that were written in the beginning of the 20th Century: “This is My Father’s World”, “Joyful Joyful We Adore Thee”, “Great is Thy Faithfulness”, “Old Rugged Cross”, and “In the Garden”. You can see an example of the Sousa/ Joplin lesson here.

I also teach a music and movement class for the nursery kids and the preschool kids. Here is the nursery class playing drums:

Assembly Time:

The kids are also involved in the assembly time, where they will have the opportunity to get up and present something to the whole group (about 100 people) a few times during the year. The preschoolers sang a song about a car and drove their assembly line cardboard cars around the room. The middle school kids presented about O. Henry, a writer of short stories. I also had several middle school kids help me with leading the hymns that I mentioned above. Here are my lower elementary kids saying the Pledge of Allegiance:

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