The Greatest Generations
Curriculum
A complete K-12 course of study, rebuilt lesson by lesson from the schoolbooks that raised the generation who went to the moon.
McGuffey and Ray, Comstock and Hillyer, Franklin and Plutarch: read in their own words, taught the way they taught.
Not nostalgia: a method. The era's schooling worked, and its books are free to every family. Yonder keeps the method and the words, and adds a gentle guide.
Ray's way: one short, honest drill at a time, and the next step only when this one is owned.
Comstock's rule: observe before explaining. Lessons send the child outdoors to count petals, read clouds, and follow tracks.
Recitation, copywork, and memory: poems, maxims, and the great documents, kept as furniture of the mind.
Every passage quoted from the schoolbooks themselves, and every lesson attributed to its source. Nothing paywalled, ever.
When a lesson pointed at its own woodcut or plate, that very picture ships with the lesson: Ray's addition birds, Comstock's fireflies, Hillyer's Stairway of Time.
Small notes bridge the old lessons to what we have learned since: the seed's folded instructions read as DNA in 1953, the first snowflake photographs of 1885.
Virtues, fables, and classics are taught as literature, history, and character. Christian studies remain an optional track, chosen by the family. The catalog is a living one, growing quietly in the background and always working offline.
Each subject is a ladder climbed in grade order, and each wears a public-domain masterwork as its cover.
Reading Garden
Sound out first letters, then climb the McGuffey ladder all the way to close reading, sentence diagramming, penmanship, and rhetoric.
The climb: McGuffey's Primer and six Eclectic Readers · Webster's Blue-Back Speller · Harvey's Grammar and Reed-Kellogg diagramming · Palmer and Spencerian penmanship · composition, rhetoric, and oratory.
Number Friends
The whole climb, from counting acorns to the sine of an angle: mental arithmetic, recitation of tables, and honest word problems, mastered one step at a time.
The climb: Ray's Primary, Intellectual, Practical, and Higher Arithmetic · Ray's Elementary Algebra · Wentworth's Plane and Solid Geometry · Wentworth's Trigonometry.
Wonder & Nature
Go outside and look closely, a leaf, a bird, a beetle, a cloud, then climb from nature study to physics, chemistry, the human body, and the stars.
The climb: Comstock's Handbook of Nature Study · Seton's animal tracks · Guyot and Maury's physical geography · Gage's physics · Steele's chemistry · Martin's Human Body · Young's astronomy.
Time Travelers
From the world's first campfire stories to Athens, Rome, the age of ships, and the founding of a new nation, reading the very words of the Declaration and the Constitution.
The climb: Hillyer's Child's History of the World · Guerber's Greeks and Romans · Montgomery's American History · the Thirteen Colonies · the Declaration, clause by clause · Carpenter's geography · the Constitution, article by article · the Gettysburg Address, entire.
Heart & Courage
Tiny fables with big lessons, Franklin's thirteen virtues, the heroes of Greece and Rome, the poems and speeches that built a nation, and at last the art of reasoning clearly.
The climb: Aesop with the Milo Winter plates · McGuffey's virtue tales · Longfellow's ballads · Franklin's virtues, Poor Richard, and the Autobiography · Bulfinch's myths · Plutarch's Lives · Jevons' first logic.
The Book
The book that shaped the Western world: its stories, laws, and language still run through our history, art, and culture. Each grade takes up reading portions suited to the child's age, widening year by year, with longer chronological readings in the later grades, so that by the time they finish they have read it in full.
The climb: the great narratives, Genesis to the Gospels · the Psalms and Proverbs · the parables and the Sermon on the Mount · and the long thread it draws through history, art, and the English language.
Included with every Yonder.
The Greatest Generations Curriculum comes with every Yonder subscription at no added cost, taught by Pip, graded with you, and yours to blend with any curriculum you bring.