• Classical Conversations,  Homeschool

    Classical Conversations Cycle 2 Week 3

    A little background: This is our family’s fourth year to participate in a Classical Conversations (CC) community. We participate in the Foundations portion of the program, which is designed for children ages 4 to about 11. The Foundations program lasts for 24 weeks each year. Each week the children cover 7 different grammar subjects (Timeline, History, Math, Science, English, Latin, and Geography), do a short (2-3 minutes) presentation, participate in one or more Science experiments and cover some area of Fine Arts.  It’s a VERY busy morning! This week, we focused on reviewing geography. Here are some resources: If you have access to CC Connected, there’s nice little packet put together by another parent…

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  • Classical Conversations,  Homeschool

    Classical Conversations Cycle 2 Week 2

    A little background: This is our family’s fourth year to participate in a Classical Conversations (CC) community. We participate in the Foundations portion of the program, which is designed for children ages 4 to about 11. The Foundations program lasts for 24 weeks each year. Each week the children cover 7 different grammar subjects (Timeline, History, Math, Science, English, Latin, and Geography), do a short (2-3 minutes) presentation, participate in one or more Science experiments and cover some area of Fine Arts.  It’s a VERY busy morning! This will be a really quick post about just a couple of things that I found to help with review for this week’s grammar. Geography Someone in…

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  • Homeschool

    Lesson Planning Software

    This is officially our fourth year of home schooling, and I have tried a little bit of everything when it comes to planning our lessons. When we first started, I purchased a boxed set of curriculum and tried to use the lesson plans that accompanied it. I soon discovered, that while the curriculum was good and the lesson plans might have been good ones, too, they just weren’t good for us. I spent hours that year creating new and complicated lesson plans in Excel, since it’s a program that I’m familiar with, and then discovered something that I probably should have realized: Life rarely goes according to plan. Kids get…

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  • Classical Conversations,  Homeschool

    Classical Conversations Cycle 2 Week 1 Update

    A little background: This is our family’s fourth year to participate in a Classical Conversations (CC) community. We participate in the Foundations portion of the program, which is designed for children ages 4 to about 11. The Foundations program lasts for 24 weeks each year. Each week the children cover 7 different grammar subjects (Timeline, History, Math, Science, English, Latin, and Geography), do a short (2-3 minutes) presentation, participate in one or more Science experiments and cover some area of Fine Arts.  It’s a VERY busy morning! This past week was our first week. Here are a few things from this week that might be helpful to others of you with…

  • Family Fun,  Homeschool,  Traditions

    I’m a total loser

    Some of my favorite memories of my childhood involve being a loser. My dad was absolutely fantastic about playing checkers with me, starting sometime around when I was 8.  After we’d gotten pretty good at playing a basic game of checkers, he had a desire to learn how to play chess, so we basically learned together.  And, here’s the important part – he never, ever LET me win. In fact, on the VERY rare occasions when I did, in fact, beat him, he would grin and look at me and say, “You gotta let the little kids win sometimes.” And I would grin and laugh with him, because we both…

  • Homeschool,  Traditions

    First Day

    So, we started our homeschool year today.  Was it perfect and smooth? Why, no, it was not.  My Kindergartener, who has anxiously been awaiting this day (mostly in anticipation of our traditional ice cream smorgasbord for lunch) and who was absolutely giddy while doing his back-to-school supply shopping the evening before, deflated and lost his enthusiasm shortly after realizing that we were going to be doing a little (and really, just a little) actual school work before we switched to the “celebration” portion of the day.  Trying to get him to complete anything was, to say the least, a challenge. His sister, a Second Grader, declared for the first time…