TOG Year 3

This has been nothing short of a challenging year for our family. With my husband's travel schedule vamped up (same amount of trips just less employees to share them) and my daughter's recent diagnosis I am honestly not sure how we survived. OK I do know...God's grace! ;-)

As I look back on this year I am even more thankful for TOG and all that it offers our family. I have always enjoyed creating lessons and putting things together for children but as they got older it became incredibly time-consuming to put in the research needed to suit their needs. This is where multi-level unit studies are a wonderful asset to our home school curriculum. I also believe in teaching history in chronological order. For us, it just makes the most sense. Since my children are so spread apart I can at any given year be teaching three to four different levels of education. At one point, I had preschool, upper grammar, dialect, and rhetoric levels. That's enough to make any home school mom misplace her sanity. But that is the very reason TOG appealed to me. While my oldest was reading The Odyssey my younger two were reading mythology from D'Aulaires Greek Myths and my preschooler sat on the floor soaking it all up. He even told his uncle his favorite king was King Agamemnon. :-) Another helpful tool for me were the detailed teacher notes and the discussion scripts for each week. Because of this we cultivated a love of history and a venue to discuss new ideas and measure them against God's Word. History discussion was my second favorite time of the week. As I have grown more comfortable with TOG I am more creative with our activities. This year my second grader built a Book of Centuries following the reading and history selections from TOG. This is a project I plan to continue in to TOG Year 4.

Often families seek outside classes for their high school students for fear that they will not be as prepared as if they just learned from home. While I believe there are benefits, I enjoy the opportunities TOG offers its high school students. For me personally, I feel this is one of its strengths.