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Classical Conversations Cycle 2 Week 15 and 16
This is the time of year in our family when a couple of things typically happen: 1) We’re just really getting back into the school “groove” and I start to feel good about what we’re accomplishing and 2) tax season hits. In some past life that I occasionally have flashbacks of, I was a CPA who had VERY, VERY little to do with taxes. I spent most of my time (and by that, I mean 50-80 hours/week) auditing fairly large, often publicly-traded companies. I won’t bore you with the details. I’ll just skip to the end of the story . . . I don’t do that any more. Okay, if…
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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 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 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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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…
