In an effort towards stabilizing the booklist and also improving our Grammar levels, we are starting to construct our own spine history audios, paperback readers, and online text. I know, right? You may be gasping in horror, screaming with joy, or simply sitting there stunned, but stay with me.
First, to be perfectly clear about one thing up front: we still love rich, living book, multi-perspective education! We have no intention of writing “one history book to rule them all” and turning Tapestry into a curriculum that can only be done as a textbook-based program.
At the same time, the past twenty years have shown us a few things:
1) Lack of a stable overview history text can be terribly frustrating for teachers, students, and curriculum designers alike.
2) We hate recommending otherwise-inferior books simply because there is no other history overview text available.
3) Especially at the Grammar levels, we cannot easily give you history discussion materials because the books we rely on keep going out of print.
4) It can be hard to find digital versions of children’s illustrated history books.
5) For some of our customers on a tight budget, with tight storage space, or working in a large group (school or co-op) context, spine books that are available in a permanent digital format would simply be a godsend.
For all these reasons, the time has come for us to write our own spine texts. We were inspired from the beginning by looms, which are set up with a “warp” and “weft” of vertical and horizontal threads. In many cases, the picture of the tapestry is woven into the fabric itself. However, some famous tapestries (such as Bayeux Tapestry) are actually stitched onto a sturdy foundational cloth formed by the threads of the warp and weft. We decided that although we don’t want to lose our colorful, vivid, living books, our rich perspective books, and our classical books, we do want to offer a sturdy foundational cloth that you can use to understand the basic information of history, church history, philosophy, literature, government, art, and music, before moving on to select from our buffet of living or classical books that add vividness and perspective, like rich colored threads in an embroidered tapestry.
We call the Grammar level audios and paperback books “Weft,” and we are thinking right now that they will be available in both digital and print. You can listen to a sample of the Weft Audio, currently in production for 2021, here.
At the Dialectic and Rhetoric levels, we refer to this project as the “Warp” (or “the Warp Drive” for our Star Trek fans, of which there are many in the Somerville family). We are sure we want the Warp to be mostly digital or web-based so that we can continuously improve, update, and hyperlink to other resources, and so that students can use it as a sort of personalized Wikipedia for research as they write papers and prepare presentations. We are not sure yet whether we might also produce some kind of paperback version—it depends on what feedback we receive!
As with the Weft, we want our Warp to be rich in the basic information and overview features that will orient upper-level students as they prepare to read all our rich books. The Warp will also include summaries of multiple perspectives on various topics, and (where possible) links to primary-source documents (e.g. Ben Franklin’s Autobiography on Project Gutenberg), curated pictures and videos, etc. It is very likely that eventually we will put some of the Poetics material (especially “history of literature” articles and author bios) on the Warp, though these materials will still be available separately as well.
If you are wondering whether we hope that the Warp and Weft will eventually replace World Book, the answer is yes, but we are still considering how to make it optimally user-friendly before we reach a final decision on that point.
At the helm of the Warp and Weft project is Nathan Somerville. In addition to his training from his parents, Scott and Marcia, Nathan has a degree in history from Hillsdale College, a six-year-old son, a tremendous talent for humorous narrative writing, and a gift of wisdom. Now forty years old, he also has the experiences of life, God, and suffering, that we feel are indispensable to a history project like this. It is hard to find a writer of Nate’s caliber (and audio recording skills) who will commit to a big, complex, multi-year writing project, so we are exceedingly grateful to God for him!
There can be no question that this is a massive undertaking, but fortunately, we have some guidelines. We will use materials from the Pop Quiz, the Guidebook, and Evaluations, as well as of course the Teacher’s Notes, to help direct our topics, scope, sequence, etc. The goal is that when we are through, you will never again have to wonder where to find the basic places, ideas, events, dates, people, etc., upon which and through whom God has woven His tapestry of grace. To that end, we covet both your feedback and your prayers.
After months of design meetings, we have actually begun to write the first version of this project, and we are beginning with the Dialectic level (Warp). We set painfully high standards, wanting the Warp and Weft to combine our best and most precise scholarship with primary sources and “fresh” historical details, to provide every bit of information called for in discussion scripts, to be beautifully concise and clear, and to be written with a marvelous sense of fun.
We prayerfully plan to complete the original offering of Weft Audio for Lower Grammar and Upper Grammar in the summer of 2021. We do not yet have a target delivery date established for the Weft History Readers (Upper Grammar) or the Warp (Dialectic and Rhetoric online articles), but keep checking back! We will update the Knowledge Base as we go. :-)