Announcements

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Most important: don’t forget to check out the Winter Deal in the Sales and Coupons section below!

Recommendations for Studying African American History

February is African American History Month, and so I have asked a new friend from the African American homeschooling community in Raleigh-Durham, NC, to share some book recommendations with us!  Rhonda Davis is a homeschooling veteran of more than two decades; two of her daughters have graduated, and one is entering high school.  She has been pleased with Tapestry of Grace as a program, and she likes the way it approaches African American history, so she is working to start a Tapestry co-op in her community.  I asked Rhonda for three African American themed book recommendations: one for younger children, one for older children, and one for adults.  I look forward to checking them out! 

• He’s Got the Whole World In His Hands, by Kadir Nelson (6-9 years old).

• Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, by Mildred D. Taylor.  Rhonda writes, “It is an accurate fictionalized representation of life after the depression, told from a 9-year-old girl’s perspective. The family deals with racism while maintaining their land.  Because of the sensitive topics . . . [this book should be] read with a parent.” (10+ years old).

• Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture), by Heather Andrea Williams.  Rhonda purchased this book while visiting Stagville Plantation, where her maternal grandmother and family can trace much of their lineage from slavery to the 1940’s.  She explains that Self-Taught intrigues her “because it shares how black moms educated their children at a time when pursuing education was illegal.”

The 2024 Edition: Your Thoughts?

As we work our way through a stack of design decisions for the next edition, we wanted to solicit your opinions on a few ideas.  You may open a ticket to share your feedback, and we will compile a list of your thoughts.  Thank you in advance to any participants in this survey! 

• Would it bother you if the Integrated Teacher’s Notes were grouped by learning level instead of by subject?
   
• If there were dozens of generic activity pages available for LG/UG that could be used for at least three subjects in many different weeks, would you prefer those in a separate Loom document (which could be printed or not as you wish), or would you prefer to have them labeled as appropriate, repeated often, incorporated directly into the Student Activity Pages (SAPS)?  WARNING: The latter option would involve much more printing and might lead to extra pages in many weeks that you wouldn’t use. 
   
• Spools Purchasers: Would you like to be able to buy all four levels of Threads, Reading Assignments, and Glances, as a separate pack that would help to provide level integration for your weeks?
   
• Do you wish we sold bundled products or product packs?  If so, which products would you group together, and what price point would you consider fair for that group?
   
• For Spools, would you prefer that we continue to offer Full Racks with the subjects collated by week, or would you be just as happy to receive your Full Rack as a collection of individual Spools that your student can collate into one notebook (or keep in separate notebooks)?  Alternatively, would you prefer to be able to choose which format you receive when you purchase Spools?

The Book-Choosing Party Has Been Shortened

We’ve had about fifty people participate in our book-choosing party over the last two months.  Thank you to those who added suggestions and comments; they have been helpful!  Unfortunately, the booklist link has been a bit finicky: it expires easily, and now it tells us that we have exceeded our allowable number of guests.  Therefore, we will stop trying to offer the link and start looking for other ways to share our book options list with you for your feedback!  Meanwhile, thank you again to those who participated.  It was great to see your thoughts, and we have captured them for future reference! 

Website and Production Updates

• Sidebar Changes: You will soon see some new sidebars appearing on several pages, and you will see more items added to sidebars already on other pages.  We will be experimenting with different combinations over the next month until we settle on an optimal arrangement, so please feel free to send feedback about what you like (or don’t) as we try different options!   
   
• Consolidating and Moving the Graphic Organizers: At your request, we have consolidated the Graphic Organizers into one document and moved that document to the Graphic Organizers section in the main body of the Writing page (between “Giving Directions” and “Grammar and Composition Notebooks”).
   
• Olney Hymns: We are delighted to announce the release of the latest in our Dialectic Literature series!  This study is now available in our store.  

• 60% off Coupon for the new Dialectic Literature Stitches book studies.  This coupon is designed to make it easy for you to purchase any complete year of Dialectic Literature Stitches for the same price you would pay to buy Year 1 Literature Studies for Young Adults. The coupon should appear on the checkout page when you put any of the Dialectic Literature Stitches in your cart. Click on the coupon to use it, or let us know if there seems to be a problem! This coupon will be good through at least March of 2023, and we will extend it if necessary to make sure that all comers have a reasonable opportunity to purchase Dialectic Literature Stitches at Literature Studies for Young Adults prices in the 2022-2023 school year.

• Buy One, Get Two Free Upgrades: Bought after January 1 of 2021, planning to upgrade at least one product to the next edition, but not exactly looking forward to paying the upgrade fee?  Also not interested in using our Work-Study Program to earn your upgrade for free?  No problem!  During the winter of 2022-2023, you can buy next year’s product and receive two free upgrades to the next edition of any same-class product: one for the year-plan (or spool or supplement) you just bought, and one to use on a same-class product you already bought.*  You can also go doubles; for example, if you own Years 1 and 2, you can buy Years 3 and 4, and thus your whole set will receive a free upgrade to the next edition!  The coupon expires on March 1 of 2023.

**Please Note: this offer will fully cover your digital orders, but if you pay for a printout of the current edition of a product, there will still be a fee to reprint your upgraded products for the next edition.  The good news is that, with the free upgrades, you will only have to pay a printing fee.  Clarification: This offer does not cover print-only products.

• The Static Booklists: We have begun by posting Static Primary Booklists (for each Year, Level, and Subject) in the Loom sections of your Year pages.  Both Integrated and Spools owners will automatically be granted access to these lists: just sign into your account, select your year page, and scroll down to the Loom documents!  You can copy and paste from these PDF Booklists, and they include an ISBN number, Amazon link, and WorldCat Library link for each book!  Over the winter, we will roll out Static Alternate Booklists for all four years in each Level and Subject to supplement your Static Primary Booklists. (These Static Alternate Booklists should also be especially useful for owners of older editions!)
  
  
• The Dynamic Booklist: Our team is simultaneously working on 3,000+ book listings for the Shop, complete with the same ISBN numbers and links you will see on the Static Loom Booklists, so that you will have a Dynamic version of the Booklist to filter and browse according to year, unit, week, learning level, subject, TOG edition, and any other filter we can dream up! We will keep you posted on the progress of the Dynamic Booklist, but we didn’t want you to be surprised to see books appearing in the Shop over the next few months! Warning: Until the Dynamic Booklist is complete, we recommend using the Static Booklists on the Loom as your authoritative reference to all books used in your 2020-2021 Integrated or Spools editions, but feel free to browse the Dynamic Booklist and watch it grow!)
  
  
• The Amazon Store: If you prefer not to use the booklists, you can find all the books available on Amazon grouped by Year, Level, and Subject at our Amazon Store.
  
  
• Paying with a Credit Card: We have added an article to our Knowledge Base to help guide you through the process of paying for Tapestry products with a credit card or debit card! 
  

• Phone Options: Please contact us using the small yellow “Help” button in the bottom right corner of any page on our website.  There, you can now open a ticket to schedule a phone call or even an online meeting!  
  

• Work/Study Program: If you have skills that we can use, and are able to offer sufficient time to offset the investment of training, we would be delighted to consider an exchange of brand-new curriculum for labor.  (For any in need who cannot offer labor, please know that we continue to offer our Scholarship Program just as before!)  You can use this program to earn any product we sell, including upgrades to the 2023 Edition.     
  

• School Choice: Did you catch the news about school choice?  We are now approved on ClassWallet for both New Hampshire and Arizona, and we are working towards more states.  To become an approved vendor in any state, we need our customers in that states to send a request to ClassWallet so that we will be added as a vendor.  If that happens, you should be able to use tax dollars to purchase TOG products!  School choice is only becoming more of a thing in 2022, so even if your state does not offer school choice options now, it may do so soon!  This independent website, EdChoice, can tell you about the options in your state.   
  

• Teacher Training Resources: If you look on the Tapestry University page (just scroll to the bottom of the homepage and look on the right), you will see all our teacher training resources neatly lined up and free to all comers.  Some of them will also be added to the Planning page.  A few need revisions to reflect the new interface, so we will gradually be working on those as well.  Thank you to those on Facebook who brought up this suggestion!  We can’t afford to make a habit of permanently free products, of course, but in this case I think it is the right answer!  
  

• Fee for Late Upgrade from Locklizard: Over the last two years, we have been glad to bear the costs of free upgrades from Locklizard for all comers!  However, now that we have lost access to our Locklizard licenses and records, it is more difficult and time consuming for our staff to look up latecomers’ records and help them make the transition.  The good news is that it can still be done!  The bad news is that we will now charge a $15 “Lookup Fee” for an upgrade from Locklizard to our new watermarking system.  If you have not yet transitioned, click here to learn more about this process, or simply use keyword “great transition” or “account” to search for articles in our Help button knowledge base!
  

• Retiring Products: I have a short list of products that we prayerfully expect to be phasing out in 2023, and retiring completely in the spring of 2024.  They are:
  1. Planning Aids
  2. Tapestry Primer
  3. Poetics
  4. Literature Studies for Young Adults
  5. Map Aids
  6. Big Story Game   
     
     If you own digital versions of any of these products, don’t worry!  They will always be available to you as downloads via your account (at bare minimum), and most (if not all) will be available via sections of TOGO that will only be visible to owners of these products.  Also, be assured that we are not retiring these products because we don’t love them as much as you do!  Rather, we love them so much that we are integrating them into the 2024 editions of our main curricula.  That’s right: starting in 2024, you’ll have all the useful content we can find from these seven products incorporated into our core products and supplements! 
     
     You will hear more details about the future of each product and the transition of content to new places in the 2024 editions in future newsletters, so keep an eye out! 
     
     Finally, one important note: we have a few copies of the print version of Primer left, and after that we will only be selling digital versions until June of 2024.  Therefore, if you (or a friend) really, really wants a print package copy of Primer, grab it soon!  The same applies to printed copies of Poetics (digital versions will continue to be available up to June of 2024 at least). 

Dialectic Literature Studies  

Below is the complete list of Dialectic Literature Stitches book studies that are already available in the store. Please note that the content of these Stitches is different from the content of Dialectic Literature in 2020 Edition Integrated and Spools.

Many (but not all) of these Stitches studies will eventually be incorporated into the 2024 editions of Integrated and Spools, but we will also continue to make them available separately as Stitches even after the release of that 2024 edition because we think there is value in allowing people to mix/match/switch/design/customize their Literature studies if they wish.  Also, there are simply too many good books available to fit everything into the Integrated and Spools year-plans, so making individual book studies available for summer study or substitution even after the 2024 edition is released seems like a good idea!

Our goal for this year, while the 2024 edition is in development, is that a full year of these Stitches Dialectic LIterature studies will cost about the same amount as the Year 1 Literature Studies for Young Adults product. To that end, we have a 60% off coupon available to help ensure that the total costs of a full year’s Dialectic Literature Stitches do not exceed the cost of Year 1 Literature Studies for Young Adults during this 2022-2023 school year. Please note, however, that purchasing even a full year’s collection of Dialectic Literature Stitches will not entitle the purchaser to copies of 2024 Spools or Integrated products containing the equivalent content. Those must be purchased separately as they become available, or received as part of a 2024 Edition upgrade.

Finally, please note that our standard copyright rules for group use do apply to this product: if you are using one of the Dialectic Literature Stitches studies to teach a class, then the family of each student in your class must own a copy of at least the student materials. You may not purchase one student copy plus one teacher copy and distribute copies of the student materials to your entire class; you may only distribute student copies to your own children in your home. Thank you for your faithful adherence to copyright law, which helps to keep us in business.

• Year 2 | The Sword and the Circle | 2 week study | $0 (free sample)
• Year 2 | Arabian Nights (full Text of the stories included) | 1 week study | $3.50 – $8.00
• Year 2 | Legends of Charlemagne (full Text of the stories included) | 1 week study | $3.50-$8.00
• Year 2 | Northland Heroes (full Text of the stories included) | 1 week study | $3.50-$8.00
• Year 2 | Canterbury Tales | 1 week study | $2.50-$5.00
• Year 2 | Good Masters, Sweet Ladies! | 1 week study | $2.50-$5.00
• Year 2 | Dante’s Divine Comedy | 3 week study | $5.00-$10.00
• Year 2 | The Second Mrs. Gioconda | 2 week study | $4.75-$8.50
• Year 2 | The Witch of Blackbird Pond | 3 week study | $5.00-$10.00
• Year 2 | Olney Hymns (full Text of three hymns included) | 1 week study | $3.50-$8.00
• Year 3 | Frankenstein (full Text included) | 3 week study | $6.00-$11.00
• Year 4 | Call of the Wild (full Text included) | 2 week study | $4.75-$8.50

UPCOMING: 2024 Edition release dates and upgrade costs

Our adventures with the rolling release of Spools Teacher have made us doubly cautious about setting release dates, but, if the Lord wills, we prayerfully hope to release 2023 Tapestry of Grace Integrated and Spools samples in December of 2023, and we hope to release the edition itself on June 1, 2024.

Final new prices for 2024 edition products have not been set across the board, but we are fixing the 2024 upgrade cost at $50 per year plan for Tapestry of Grace Integrated, and we expect to make a (proportionately smaller) upgrade fee option available for Tapestry of Grace Spools. 

If you purchased Tapestry materials after December 30th, 2020, or plan to purchase between March 1 of 2023 and June 1 of 2024, you may be wishing you had some way to get an upgrade to the 2024 Integrated or Spools (or both) without having to pay money for it.  Well, wonder no further!  If you would prefer to exchange materials or labor (figured at $15/hr), rather than cash, you can explore any of the following options:

• Student Writing Samples for our Writing Page: We are working to build our library of Writing Samples (samples of student papers completed according to the Writing Aids genres and TOG  writing assignments).
  
• Book Descriptions and Reviews for our Booklist: We need thousands (literally) of book descriptions and reviews for the new Booklist Tool.  These reviews will also help us to select the very best books for the 2024 Booklist. 
  
• Product Developers in These Areas of Interest:
  • Greek and Latin vocabulary root lessons 
  • Art appreciation lessons
    
• Other: Any idea you’ve had that you would love to contribute… just open a ticket and we’ll have a conversation about it!  We can’t guarantee that we will say “yes,” but we’ll be eager to explore the possibility. 🙂

Please note that this production calendar is an approximation only and subject to continuous change. The planned products and elements of new editions listed below are subject to change throughout the design process. Also, product development routinely runs two to six months late in “real time” due to a variety of factors, including unforeseeable circumstances. We urge you not to plan your school year around the expectation of having certain products available within the exact time frame described on this calendar.