This year for our 9th grade civics and economics class, I had the students download the free app "best broker". You get $25,000 (I think - it may be 20,000) to spend on whatever stocks you want. They have been tracking them on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis and will give a report to the class at the end of the semester on how their portfolio performed. The only drawback to the app is that it is in euros, not dollars. My daughter invested in companies like FB, L'oreal, Twitter, and Apple, as well as some medical companies. My son used it all to buy Bitcoin. It's been fun watching them watch their portfolio and groaning or gloating depending on how the market went that day. For texts, they have been reading "Whatever Happened to Penny Candy" and its accompanying book of articles, questions, and answers, as well as "The Money Mystery". Both texts are in the Uncle Eric series, published by Bluestocking Press.

We have loved the community aspect of CC, as well as the accountability that our kids have to someone other than mom. I directed two high school level classes and the group dynamic was amazing. This year, the high school group - different students - has struggled, and I'm not really sure why. I think they just never clicked like the previous one, so conversation around the subjects was limited and frustrating. We have also loved the memory work, although as some have posted in other threads, some of it is frustratingly random. When I first started in CC we were in SoCal and it was a very new thing out west. Having taught in a classical school before having children, I was quickly tapped to become a tutor and enjoyed my time there. Then we moved to Canada and there was nothing - homeschooling is about 15 years behind the States up here in terms of recognition and application. I continued to use CC at home, as well as other things that I liked, but I really missed being a part of a group that had a common vision for how they wanted to educate their kids. Fast forward a few years and we had a good group going - about 10 families spread out over all three levels. Then we got a support rep in Canada, who happened to be in our group, and things went sideways. Essentially, management and CC policy killed our group. We decided we wanted community more than we wanted CC, so we made a unanimous decision and split from them - all but the support rep. That was a year ago. We kept the group going, even adding some new families, and essentially did a form of CC, with mostly new memory work (CC communities are in Cycle 3 - American History this year and I changed a bunch of stuff to be Canadian focused in both the elementary level and the high school class), but we can't continue the way we did this past year. It has come down to either going back to CC and bowing to their policies, or completely separating from them and going our own way. As the Executive Director of the community, it has really come down to me to instill a vision for the community that can carry us through this transition time. I want to guide the group back to a truly classical, 4 cycle, history based trajectory, while still maintaining the community aspect, which we all love, but it's a ton of work and, as some of you have mentioned, it's difficult to get everyone on the same page - we are all homeschoolers and value our freedom!

Has anyone ever tried doing a classical curriculum like The Well Trained Mind recommends in a once a week community setting, where the students come together to discuss what they've been reading and go back home the other days of the week and do work for the next week? I am trying to figure out how to work something like this in our homeschool community, but am daunted by the task. I would love some feedback if anyone has done it before. Full disclosure: We used to be Classical Conversations, but have parted ways with them. We still want the good things we had in CC without all the negative things.

I too am curious about the "not wanting to lend credibility to her" and "stupid panels" comments? Is there something wrong with the Classical Conversations program?