What Is Classical Conversations and Why We Chose It

Imagine that you are building a house. What would be the first place that you would start (assuming the land has already been cleared and permits are pulled)?

The foundation.

In education, having a strong foundation is critical to building upon in the future. If the foundation is weak (facts are not memorized, dates and people are abstractly learned, and each subject is seen as being completely separate and on its own), future information will be harder to grasp and eventually the foundation will fall apart leaving a very frustrated student.

As Christian homeschooling parents, having a God-centered curriculum was our main concern. Having a curriculum that reinforces our faith, beliefs, and would help our children critically understand why we believe what we believe AND give them the strong foundation in academics was hugely important to us.

That is why we chose to use Classical Conversations as our children's curriculum, not just for this year but, Lord willing, for the rest of their education.

From K4-6th grade, children are given a strong foundation. In fact during these "Foundations" years, children memorize 7 pieces of information per week (24 weeks per year) through songs and rhymes:

• Timeline
• History
• Math
• Science
• English Grammar
• Latin
• Geography

They also memorize a passage of Scripture in Latin and the English translation, the books of the Bible, and the Presidents of the United States. While they are learning all of this information, they are also learning how God, His hand, or plan can be seen in each and every subject.

There are 3 cycles in Classical Conversations, with each year covering one cycle. Every three years, children relearn the same information solidifying what they learned previously and allowing the child to learn more the second or 3rd go around.

For example, right now we are in Cycle 3 which focuses on American history. We are reading a few biographies on the people we are learning about, watching videos and movies based on the historical events we are memorizing, and reading historical fictions based on times periods we are in. In three years when we are in Cycle 3 again, Addie will be in 5th grade and able to be assigned biographies to read on her own while I read to Ian at the level that he will be at.

Which brings me to another aspect of CC I love. Both of my children will be learning the same exact information, but I can take it to the level each child is at. For instance, next year Ian will be required to join CC because he will be four and on campus. I will only be having him memorize the information as best he can.... with no pressure.... and if he wants to listen in on what I do with Addie, he can.

Right now, my daughter will learn over 500 pieces of information this year alone. Do I expect her to understand fully everything she is learning, grasp every concept, and be able to explain everything she has memorized? No, and neither does the founder of Classical Conversations. That is why children cover each cycle at least 2 times in elementary school. Each time they review something, a little more will stick, a little more will be understood, and their foundation will be that much stronger.

Does my daughter understand everything she has learned? Almost! She amazes me with everything she has absorbed so far. In fact, I love that as she is going through her day and hearing something completely unrelated to our schoolwork, she relates things back to what she has learned on her own. For example, she was reading a storybook and in it the author wrote out each of the five senses without naming them as such. She gasped and shouted, "Mom! Those are our five senses!" (which she had just memorized for science a few weeks prior)

When my children reach 4th grade, they will enter a new phase of the program called "Essentials." This phase of the program spans 4th-6th grades, and English grammar becomes the focus of their educational program. They will have a huge text book that they will work through each year from beginning to end. The first year is meant to familiarize them with the information. The second year  things in the book begin to make sense and pieces fall into place (now that they and you are out of shock from the first year of Essentials and the intensity of the program). The third year, essay writing becomes easier and all of the grammar information they have learned now is completely understandable in their minds (per kids in our co-op who are in their final year of Essentials).

Because of what Addie is memorizing for English Grammar in Foundations, she will not have to learn parts of speech and how to use them simultaneously. She will have memorized what the parts of speech are, which words fall under each part, and what sentence parts are. I am not bothered that she will not know how to use them until she reaches 4th grade. I know that when the time comes, having a strong foundation will benefit her when it is time to build a structure on her foundation.

As they leave Foundations and Essentials, my children will reach the Challenge stage. In the Challenge stage, literature, critical thinking, and expressing their thoughts correctly in persuasive, thought provoking ways becomes a huge focus of their education. Speech making becomes a frequent assignment, giving them the skills to think critically on their feet before an audience- a skill many adults do not have.

During the Challenge phase, parents are encouraged to begin allowing their students to work independently and to become a resource instead of being an instructor. This teaches students responsibility and time management. 

Addie is loving CC. I love seeing her love for learning bloom in a way I have never seen before. The child asks to study! She has us all humming her memory songs along with her randomly throughout the day. She asks to listen to the "Timeline Song" (which she is up to date with in her memorization). She randomly starts skip counting as she is walking through the house or folding laundry. One day, for fun, she sat down and began drawing out the human body complete with simple skeletal, muscular, digestive, and respiratory systems and then proceeded to explain to us why people get heartburn.

I am so thankful to God for Classical Conversations.

I am linking up at: Happy and Blessed Home, The Pin Junkie, The Homeschool Nook

24 Books We Are Reading This Summer to Prepare Us for Classical Conversations Cycle 3

This post contains affiliate links.

This coming year, we will be joining the Classical Conversations method of education. I am so excited about this upcoming school year!

Classical Conversations has a three year cycle- Cycle 1, Cycle 2, and Cycle 3. This coming year, every Classical Conversations group around the world will be working through Cycle 3- American History.

Because Classical Conversations is designed in the Foundations years (K4-6th grade) to give parents a skeleton to work from, we can add as much or as little as we want.

I have already begun putting books on reserve in our library to be available to us during the school year based on the history theme for each week, but I also wanted to be able to use some of the great books I have collected over the years. Some of the books, my 6 year old can read on her own, and some are definitely going to be Mommy/Addie reading time material.

My goal is not to fill Addie's head with tons of information. In fact, if we do not finish reading all of these books, I am not going to worry about it. We have the whole school year to read great books about our American history and heritage. My goal is to make Addie familiar with names, places, events, and moments in our history so that when these things come up in conversation, school, the news, shows that she watches, or other books that she reads, she has something to refer back to, and mentally she can start piecing together what she has already learned to the new information she hears, reads, or sees.

Some of the books are purely historical, some are biographies, and some are historical fiction. I want to have a good balance in there so my lover of books doesn't get bored or lose her love for reading. There is one video series in here that I have scheduled for us to watch at lunch time during the school year.

Buttons for General Washington (Carolrhoda on My Own Book.)
Great Women of the American Revolution (We the People: Revolution and the New Nation)
The Story of the Boston Tea Party: Cornerstones of Freedom
Colonial Clothes (Colonial Quest)
Christopher Columbus: Adventurer of Faith and Courage (Sowers)
The Long Way to a New Land (I Can Read Book 3)
And there was America,
And Then What Happened, Paul Revere? (Paperstar)
Sam the Minuteman (I Can Read Book 3)
Ben and Me: An Astonishing Life of Benjamin Franklin by His Good Mouse Amos
They Made a Revolution: 1776
Thanksgiving Is
The Mayflower Adventure (The American Adventure Series #1)
Squanto, Friend Of The Pilgrims (Scholastic Biography)
Squanto and the Miracle of Thanksgiving
Pocahontas Indian Princess Weekly Reader Books Edition
Pedro's Journal: A Voyage with Christopher Columbus, August 3, 1492-February 14, 1493
The great proclamation,: A book for young Americans
The Story of Alexander Graham Bell, Inventor of the Telephone
The Story of Sacajawea: Guide to Lewis and Clark (Dell Yearling Biography)
The Life And Words Of Martin Luther King Jr. (Scholastic Biography)
America : A Patriotic Primer
Liberty's Kids - The Complete Series
The Story of Thomas Jefferson, Prophet of Liberty (Dell Yearly Biography)
 
I'm linking up with The Squishable Baby, Happy and Blessed Home,

Story of the World | A Review

We have recently completed our 1st grade year. At the end of any school year (whether I was in the classroom or homeschooling), I have always taken a step back to evaluate what worked, what didn't, and what I needed to change for the following year.

As you saw from last week's post, we will be continuing First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind in second grade. However, something we will be changing is our approach to history (more on how we will be doing this will come in the next two weeks).

This year we used The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child: Volume 1: Ancient Times: From the Earliest Nomads to the Last Roman Emperor along with the accompanying workbook. There were definitely pros and cons to this book for me. In fact, there were more pros and only one issue for me. But for me and my preferences, the con outweighed the pros.


Pros:

Addie loved it! 

When you have all of your school books laid out and your child chooses history as the first subject they want to work on, you know the book is great in terms of keeping their attention. The book itself was thick and had 42 chapters with very few illustrations. There was a lot of reading, but my daughter (who started the year as a five year old and turned six in February) loved it.

Geography became a familiar friend.

We have all heard of the statistics of Americans not knowing where the USA is on a world map.
That is not an issue with this approach. Geography is a daily exercise. Depending on which portion of history you are learning, your geography will center around that region for the entire year. The maps have different tasks to be completed, and crayons are usually involved making for a fun approach to learning the geography of the region being studied.

Shorter segments of history.

As a teacher in a classroom setting, our history books every year began at Creation and spanned time by ending with Reagan and the fall of communism (the books definitely needed to be updated!). With any curriculum using a classical approach, small chunks of information are used for one year so the child can really grasp the concepts and information being given.

This past year, we only learned about Ancient History from the Nomads to the fall of Rome. I loved this approach because we were able to really focus on specific historical events and people. That is where the real learning comes in. Just remembering dates and names means nothing in the grand scheme of things. Learning from the times and people, from their mistakes and triumphs, and connecting the dots from an event from history and how it has affected our present, that is where learning truly happens.

Narrative form

The book is written as if  a story was being told. That type of approach is very engaging. Not just for the reader, but for the listener as well. For me personally, if you tell me a story, I am more likely to remember what I heard than if you gave me the same information in a very clinical, factual way.

A few weeks after we had finished history for the year, my father was visiting and we were talking about the movie "Braveheart," a historical movie based on the life of William Wallace, a 13th century Scottish warrior who led the first Scottish war for independence again England (very graphic in battle scenes and we skip over the entire wedding scene- NOT a movie for children). There were certain details in the movie that I had been unaware until reading The Story of the World were actually historically based details, such as the warriors painting themselves blue. While my father and I were talking about that particular fact, Addie who had overheard us talking about "blue paint" came over and explained to Dad why the men from Britain had used blue paint on themselves in battle against the Romans based on what we had read when Rome invaded Britain. I was amazed that she still remembered that after several weeks.

Another time, after studying Egypt, my father had gotten us a DVD about Egypt that featured many of the places we had learned about, including tombs of the pharaohs. As they showed different tombs, one tomb shown was for the only woman pharaoh of Egypt, Hatshepsut. Addie got so excited and said, "Mom, it's the tomb for Hatshepsut, the lady pharaoh!" She would never have remembered anything about this obscure woman had it not been for the intriguing story of her life and how she took the throne away from her only brother.

It is designed to be a spring board.

The workbook has a teacher's guide section at the front of the book. In this section, parents are given ideas on how to turn each chapter in to an entire unit of study from arts and crafts to which books should be borrowed from the library or bought in order to read in more depth about the people, civilizations, and times currently being studied. 

Con:

Too liberal in its approach to history

This negative comes from my worldview. As a Christian, God's Word is the lens through which I choose to view the world and the choices I make.

God's Word and the aspects of history that we learn from His Word took place in what is considered Ancient Times. Yet, the author of The Story of the World inserted these moments in history as mere hiccups and gave no authoritative credibility to the Bible. It was given the same, if not less, credibility as any other book of history. (From my understanding, the author is considered to be a Christian, which is why I chose this book.)

When great Biblical historical figures such as Abraham, Joseph, and Moses were talked about, the Bible (where their account comes from) was not even treated as though its account was completely accurate. Part of Abraham's account was even taken from documents other than Scripture- causing him to appear different than how God's Word portrays him. At those times, we would just close the book and read God's account of these men.

There were many times when a historical reference was made that I would have to connect the dots to God's Word on my own because the connection was not given in the book (for example, when we learned about Cyrus, I had to show his connection to God's people on my own).

With as little as God was mentioned and as little credibility He was given, I found it disturbing that the gods of the civilizations we were studying were given so much "time" and so many mythological stories were written. We skipped these.  

The curriculum we will be using this coming year takes the approach that history fits into God's timeline. They do recommend The Story of the World as a supplement to their history if more background information is wanted, but it is not the foundation for their history. I am looking forward to sharing with you what our upcoming school year will look like.

Do you use The Story of the World? Do you like it? What do you like about it? What don't you care for about it?

Review- First Language Lessons

This post contains affiliate links.

Teaching grammar was always so frustrating for me when I taught in the classroom. So needless to say, I was not looking forward to teaching the subject to my 6 year old daughter.

In the classroom, We had a huge text book that had 170 lessons in it, covered every single part of speech, sentence structure, punctuation, creative writing, and expected students to become proficient in the subject by the end of the school year.

How do you get kids to understand the difference between a subject and a direct object, memorize the list of prepositions and then identify them in a sentence, diagram sentences when all of the parts of speech get jumbled up, and figure out if wind is being used as a noun or verb?

It was frustrating.

Last year as I looked into teaching my daughter classically (check here for a list of all of our 1st grade curriculum), I came across First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind (Vol. Levels 1 & 2) (First Language Lessons) and got an overwhelming feeling of "We can totally do this!"

First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind does not intend to make a child an expert in every aspect of grammar in one year. Instead, the goal is to have the child become so familiar with two or three parts of speech in the course of one year while slightly glancing at other aspects of grammar, such as noun-verb agreement, in a "no pressure" kind of way.

I love the book I purchased last year because I am able to use this same book for second grade as well (Levels 1 & 2). Each year has 100 lessons and those lessons focus on a few aspects of grammar only.

In first grade we learned about nouns, pronouns, and actions verbs, although the full definitions of each of these three parts were taught and memorized the entire year. I honestly thought if I heard the definition of a noun one more time, I would stick cotton in my ears. Towards the end of the year, we also learned about the four different types of sentences. We also learned the art of answering questions in a complete sentence and how to summarize a story that we had heard. Throughout the year, we also learned how to memorize and recite poetry with proper poise and diction.

Looking ahead to the 2nd grade section, the other parts of speech are taught, Nouns, pronouns and verbs are reviewed, and other aspects of grammar (punctuation, capitalization, etc.) are also taught and reviewed throughout the entire year.

The lessons are simple and are done orally with the child. There is a lot of "repeat after me" and repetition throughout the year. Any concept taught can be turned into a a written assignment, and the ideas for the assignment are written in the book but are made relevant to the child. When we learned about nouns being a "thing", the instructions for "enrichment acticities" were to have Addie look around the room we were in and list the "things" that she saw (I had to give her the spelling). Other times, there was copywork which was either based on a poem we were memorizing or something relevant to the lesson for the day. Some days had no copywork.

The only supplies needed for our Language Lessons were pencil, paper, and crayons. Because a classical education uses actual textbooks or just books in general, I will be able to use this same textbook when Ian enters 1st grade.

My favorite part of this curriculum was that my daughter actually learned grammar!

The fact that she truly understood what she had learned in grammar this year came at the dinner table one night. Pronouns had been our focus for about a week at that point, and I was glad for our break from nouns. As we were talking Brian used the word "he" in a sentence.

Addie immediately shouted out, "You said 'he!' He is a pronoun!"

I don't know what my favorite aspect of the moment was- seeing the concept click in her mind outside of "school" or the expression on Brian's face that his then five year old could identify pronouns.

Whether you are choosing a classical method of education of a traditional method, I would highly recommend First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind. What a great way to give your child a strong foundation in grammar.