ADVANCED HOMESCHOOL CURRICULUM
AGES 8–14
Arc 1 - Series 1
.png)
Arc 1 is the start of the year, and it teaches the habits the rest of the year needs. Look before you decide. Measure before you explain. Read a source for what it does, not for what it sounds like.
Â
The six weeks start in a forest that two peoples know in two different ways. They move through a cholera outbreak nobody could find the cause of. They end on energy, and on who has owned it in each era.
Â
Each week comes in a Lower Division and an Upper Division edition. Both are in the purchase. Children at different stages can work the same week at their own level.
WEEK ONE
Reading the Forest in Lower Division and The Forest That Counts in Upper. A Kayapó grandmother knows a tree by memory, by use, and by which path leads to more of it. A visiting scientist knows the same tree by its coordinates, its canopy cover, and its specimen code. Both are paying close attention. Your child spends the week working out what each way of knowing can see, what it misses, and what gets lost when only one of them is allowed to count. The math is counting and comparing in Lower Division, ratios and rates and reading a data display in Upper. The science is learning to tell a clue from a guess and to design a test someone else could repeat.
WEEK TWO
The Hidden Cause and The Thing We Could Not See. London in the middle of the nineteenth century, when people were dying in numbers and nobody could see why. This is the week about reasoning toward a cause you cannot observe directly, which turns out to be most of the causes that matter. Students estimate deaths from records that are incomplete, work with how fast an outbreak grows, and meet germ theory as an argument that had to be won rather than a fact that was always known. They also look at who got blamed along the way, because outbreaks produce scapegoats as reliably as they produce patients.
WEEK THREE
First Builders. What does it take to build something that stands, and to keep it standing after the people who built it are dead? Students measure, estimate, and reason about load and proportion, and they learn that an estimate is only honest when it says what it assumed. On the science side they look at why structures hold and why they fail, and a failure teaches more here than a success does. On the history side they look at who actually did the work, who ended up named in the record, and how a building technique gets lost between one generation and the next.
WEEK FOUR
Fight Back. Colonialism, independence, and what independence actually delivered. Students count what was taken and what was never repaid, and in Upper Division they model extraction and debt and have to name the assumptions behind every number they produce. They read the Haitian Revolution, the strategy of nonviolence, and the argument over reparations. The hard idea in the week, and it is handled carefully, is that winning independence and holding sovereignty are two different things, and that useful knowledge sometimes gets produced inside systems that were doing real harm.
WEEK FIVE
World Breakers. The Mongol century. Students calculate how one million people governed a hundred million, then redo it across a range of estimates rather than a single tidy figure, which is a lesson in itself. They price a caravan, time the relay riders, and follow the plague along the same roads that carried silk and ideas. The science runs from how an epidemic spreads to a 2022 study showing the Black Death left a mark in the immune genes of people alive today. The discipline the week demands is holding the destruction and the connection in view at once without shrinking either one to make the argument easier.
Who Controls the Fire. Every era has run on some source of power, and in every era someone has owned it. Students measure power in watts, compare fuels, and work through what an energy transition actually costs. The science is combustion, thermodynamics, and the hard ceilings physics puts on any method of turning a source into useful work. The history runs from fire as property through the mill monopoly and the coal barons to OPEC and the question of who will own the sun.
WEEK SIX
Every week runs on the same shape. Four days of lessons, with language arts, math, social studies, and science each day, and then a fifth day that works differently: your child takes a position on the week's big question, backs it up with the sources they've been reading all week, and defends it in a discussion.
​
Every lesson comes at five levels of difficulty. The easiest asks a student to read a figure and say what it shows. The hardest asks them to build an argument and hold it up under pressure. Your child picks the level, and moves up when they're ready rather than when a schedule says so. That's the thing that lets a ten-year-old and a thirteen-year-old sit at the same table working the same week and both be genuinely stretched.
​
Most curricula are built around coverage: a list of topics, checked off in order. This one is built around what a student can do with what they know, which is the same idea behind the international assessments that compare school systems to each other. The work covers the science practices and the math strands a reporting family needs, and each week states plainly what it is teaching in all four core subjects.
Meeting your local home education requirements
Home education requirements are set where you live, and they vary widely. Some jurisdictions require notice, assessments, portfolios, or evidence of instruction in particular subjects; others require very little. It is your responsibility to know and meet the rules that apply to your family.
What TPA can do is make the academic record much easier to document.
Each Arc provides a clear paper trail:
-
The units themselves, identifying the subjects, disciplines, and central questions being studied.
-
Your student’s dated handwritten work, organized by day.
-
Rubric-based feedback showing how the student performed at each level of challenge.
-
The TPA Alignment Summary, explaining the program’s academic foundations, structure, and approach to assessment in language an outside evaluator can readily understand.