CC at Home Cycle 1 Week 1

In our first week of doing Classical Conversations Foundations at home we had a lot of fun. The children really enjoyed getting up in the morning, doing morning chores, breakfast, math, and then sitting down together with out memory board to go over the weekly memory work. Keep in mind that I placed this info on our Memory board and we only spent about 30 minutes 4 times a week going over this information. It doesn't take up a lot of time at all. Now on the 1st day it can take a little longer cause we introducing new memory work so it might need a little more time and the children might have some questions about it. I also used this as a way to help the children in there non fiction book selections at our weekly library trip as well. Here is what we went over for Week 1:

Science

What are the five kingdoms of living things?
Animalia
Plantae
Fungi
Protista
Monera

We learned this to the beat of to the nursery rhyme "Brother John(Are you sleeping)"
Here is a great youtube clip of two little girls that are doing some great songs and jingles to Cycle 1's Science sentences. I have been using this a tool.





History

Ten Commandments 1- 5(KJV Version)

Thou Shalt...

1. have no other god before me
2. not make unto thee any graven image
3. not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.
4. remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy
5. honor thy mother and thy father that thy days may be long upon the land that God giveth thee

Here is the youtube clip we used to memorize the commandments to.




Grammar/English

What is a Preposition?

A preposition is a word that shows the relationship to a noun or pronoun to another word in a sentence.
(I did not use the definition from the Foundations guide. Instead we are memorizing the definition from First Language Lessons by Susan Wise Bauer cause that is what we are using as our grammar program for 1st and 2nd. I didn't want to confuse them by changing the wording of the definition after they already learned it the way I listed it.)


Math

1's and 2's Skip Counting

1,2,3,4,5,6,
7,8,9,10,11,12

2,4,6,8,10,12,
14,16,18,20,22,24

We didn't do any special chant or song for these skip counts because they are pretty basic. I do have some cleaver little things for the 3's and beyond though. I will share that in the future weeks.


Latin

For Latin instead of memorizing the declensions that are in the guide we are doing our lessons in Prima Latina instead. So for this week we did Lesson 1 in Prima Latina.
Its separated into Practical Latin Phrase, Vocabulary, and The Prayer.

So for this week it was:

Practical Latin
Salve- hello(to one person)
Salvete-hello(to more than one person)


Vocabulary

The format is the learn the Latin, English translation, and then the English derivative(this part really helps the children to make the connections between there own spoken language and its Latin roots. I totally love this part of the curriculum.)

ambulo- I walk - ambulance
via- road- viaduct
Deus- God- deity
toga- toga
luna- moon- lunar


Prayer

Oremus- Let Us Pray

The lesson began focusing in on explaining the differences between the Latin alphabet and the English one. They also explained how to pronounce the vowels in Latin as well.

Geography

Fertile Crescent Area

Mediterranean Sea
Fertile Crescent
Sumer
Euphrates Rive
Tigris River

Here is the video for the jingle to memorize this. As we sang we locate and place a treat(raisins, chocolate chips, Cheerios, etc..) on the locations. If you have older students you can have them draw and trace these places as well. Or make a labeled outline.




Art Project

This weeks art lesson focused in on the Five Basic Shapes.

The Five Basic Shapes are:
Dots
Circles
Straight lines
Curved lines
Angle lines

We start with a warm up exercise and then follow up with a project.

Warm Up
Explore the five basic shapes by practice drawing different variations of the five basic shapes by sizes and length and whatnot. We used a blank piece of unlined paper to practice on. After that we practice making a figure that incorporated all or as many of the Five Basic Shapes as they could.
My oldest made a drawing of a little girl. My oldest son made a snowman.

Project
We used Kids Can Draw African Animals drawing book and followed the diagram to create a Leopard out of Circles, Curved lines, straight lines, and dots.  Here is a video of them using the techniques that they learned.




Science Project

We did experiments  from Janice Van Cleave's 201 Awesome, Magical, Bizzare, and Incredible Experiments.

Experiment # 45 Baby Bean

We soaked some pinto beans overnight. The next day we were able to slip the seed coat off and break open the two halves to figure out what was inside. So it was basically a seed dissection with the purpose of dissecting a bean to identify the parts and learn the function of each part. They did a Scientific Log Sheet that was in the Appendix of the Foundations Guide but you can find some similar to at these links here:

Science Lab Sheet This one is very similar to the one we used.

Science Detective Report This one is for early elementary students.