Classical Conversations At Home

As you know from my previous post about Curriculum Confusion I was able to obtain a Classical Conversations Foundations Guide 3rd Edition on clearance a few months back. This was before the role out of the new 4th Edition that is why I got for so cheap. It was only $15 at the time and the orginal price was $50.

Well for those of you who don't know Classical Conversations or CC for short is a program started by founder Leigh Bortins(author of Echo In Celebration and The Core: Teaching Your Child the Foundations of Classical Education) to help support and enhance homeschoolers in their desire to classically educate at home. There are CC communities all over the U.S. where once a week the students get together and are lead by a CC Tutor in the weekly memory work from the foundations guide in the form of tunes, jingles, and chants. They also conduct a science experiment and have a fine arts portion which changes between drawing, tin whistle lessons, classical artist, and classical composers throughout the year. I have been to visit two different CC Campuses in my local area and I was greatly impressed with the program and set up. Although I totally love the program I was not sold on it for our particular family due to the cost of enrolling all my kids and also me not feeling like I could make the commitment to participate in a once week class every week for 24weeks with a two littles still(my 3yr old and my 10month old). So we were sad about not being able to give this a shot. But when I got a hold of the Foundations Guide I decided to give this a try at home instead.

What better time than this summer to start on Cycle 1 of the 3 cycle Guide. We started last week and if we continue through the summer we will hit Week 24 at the end of October. Which works out perfectly for our family cause our lease is up and we will be moving at the end of October. So we can just keep out the materials we use with the CC Memory Board that I made(pictured below) and our Math books so that I can start getting everything packed up. And then we can take a 2 week fall break and get started in our new curriculum for 2012-2013 school year. So it seems like this is going to work out great. I guess if this goes all well we will started Cycle 2 this coming Summer and Cycle 3 the following. Its turning out to be a great Summer Homeschool Curriculum.

Of course I want to share with you guys what we are doing each week and how we are tweeking it to fit our family and whatnot. So I decided to go ahead and do a weekly post called CC at Home Cycle 1 Week(whatever week it is). So be on a look out for that. I am so excited. The children really seem to enjoy it.

Other than the Foundations Guide we are using:

Drawing With Children by Mona Brookes- Fine Arts
Prima Latina- Latin( I didnt like the way the Latin was set up in the Guide and we were already working our way through Prima so I am just sticking with that.)
Kingfisher History Encyclopedia- History Sentence(Used to look up more information of the history sentence and the timeline sentences)
Janice VanCleave's Awesome, Magical, Bizarre, and Incredible Experiments- Science Experiments( The Guide uses a few experiments from this book so I borrowed a copy from the library and made copies of the pages I would need for Cycle 1.
We are also adding our Hebrew Studies Bible Memory Work in as well( I will do a separate blog to share those resources.)