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Classical Conversations Week 10
This week our “Science Project” was Facility Clean-up! I loved the opportunity to do a little something for our hosting church. They are wonderful and we SO appreciate their willingness to host our Classical Conversations (CC) group each week. Just to keep it real here, when I asked my son after the day was over what his favorite and least favorite parts of his CC day had been, “cleaning up his classroom” fell into the “least favorite” category. We need to do some work on the idea of serving others joyfully, obviously. All the children in my class were wonderfully helpful, though, and more than willing to pitch in and…
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Classical Conversations Cycle 2 Week 9
We got to go to our local children’s science center this week. To be honest, I wasn’t actually thinking in advance about how well their “Space” section fit in with what we were covering in CC, but it sure worked out perfectly! It was very cool to see the relative size of the planets on a larger scale and see lots of facts about them, the sun and the stars. It was just an excellent tie-in to the science grammar we’re covering in CC . . . reinforcing and adding to those memory pegs! Science Grammar Our cup overrunneth with ways to expand on this week’s Science Grammar! I’ll keep…
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Creating Classical Conversations Playlists in iTunes
As more and more of us switch to some sort of smart phone or tablet, there are more of us who would like to have our CC music on these gadgets. I’ve talked to several moms this year who would like some guidance on how to organize their CC music on iTunes, or who would like to create weekly playlists of the songs that apply to that week so they can concentrate their review. The following is how I keep my music organized. There may be better ways to do it, and I am ALWAYS open to suggestions. So, if you’ve got any thoughts or suggestions, please leave them in…
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Classical Conversations Cycle 2 Week 8
We’re back from our Fall Break and going strong. Or rather, we’re working our way up to “going strong.” It takes a week or so to get back in the swing of things. But the cycle of CC waits for no man, so we’d better get our act together. The break for the winter holidays will be quickly upon us. Math I created a little skip counting “booklet” that we used in class. You are welcome to download it by clicking on the image to the right. The idea is that the child works their way from the “1” block, which has the most information to the “7” block, which…
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Classical Conversations Cycle 2 . . . ummmmm, wait . . . FALL BREAK!
Tin Whistle While we’ve been on break this week, I did a little browsing around for new (and fun!) ways to teach and reinforce the music theory that we’re learning during the 6 weeks of Tin Whistle at CC. Our CC Community just started Tin Whistle this past week, so we have 5 more weeks to go. I’ll be honest, Tin Whistle is not my favorite part of CC. I actually don’t mind the music theory, although I would NEVER, seriously NEVER, call myself particularly proficient in this area. Really, what I am is a great APPRECIATOR of music. Pre-kids we had season tickets to the Symphony for a couple…
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Classical Conversations Cycle 2 Week 7
One more great week of CC in the books! English There are three very simple games on the following website for reviewing Possessive Adjectives – http://www.letshavefunwithenglish.com/games/possessive_adjectives/ This is a fun little picture book about pronouns. If you’ll go to the link at Amazon, you can flip through some sample pages of the book and see what it’s like. History FAIR WARNING! I haven’t actually read ANY of the following books. I have most of them on order, so I can come back and adequately review them, but right now, please consider this to be a very uneducated recommendation (there are reviews of them at Amazon, if you’d like to see those).…
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Classical Conversations Cycle 2 Week 6
Whew! We got to spend a really great weekend with my parents, visited a wonderful farm, and took a trip to a nearby aquarium in route home. We rushed back into town on Monday night and then spent quite a bit of time preparing my husband to teach three new (to him) online high school level classes on Tuesday, so this is the least attention that CC has gotten around here in a long time! This post might turn out to be short . . . hopefully it will be sweet, or at least slightly helpful. Math It’s around this time (skip counting 11’s-15’s, squares and cubes) in the math…
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Classical Conversations Cycle 2 Week 5
Are you familiar with the 10-24-7 rule? It isn’t exactly the method that we employ with Classical Conversations, but it’s similar. It basically says that to move something new from your short-term to your long-term memory you need to review the information 10 minutes after you’ve first learned it, then 24 hours later, and then 7 days later. If things were to go according to plan in a CC classroom, we’d introduce the new grammar information to the children earlier in class, then review it at the end of class (not exactly 10 minutes later, but within an hour or two). Then, outside of the classroom, the information is theoretically being…
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Classical Conversations Cycle 2 Week 4
English The Schoolhouse Rocks video about Pronouns (which we’ll continue to cover in grammar thru week 6) is very entertaining . . . and possibly educational. You can find it via a search of YouTube. Science Just to keep in simple, I made a little cycle hand out that can be used while we’re going over the cycles. If you’d like to use it, you may download it by clicking on the image below. The Magic Schoolbus Episode and Book “Wet All Over” covers the water cycle really well. Both the DVD and the book are available at Amazon, and the video is also available on you tube: There are…
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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…
