Does anyone do Classical Conversations at home?

[hsmom2011]

n/m

[chepyl]

We are doing Foundations at home right now. DS loves the timeline cards. We are on week 5 - 40 cards. He messes up a few in the middle, bit it is going well. The book and Cds are more of a struggle. We laugh at the songs, a lot! They are catchy and we find ourselves humming them occasionally. I am n t stressed about full memorization of all of it right now. We will do the full cycle 2 times with each child. By then, ds will know it. He does better memorizing what we have studied. He is not as motivated to memorize as he would be if we were with a group once a week, reciting the memory work. This is our first year for any memorywork too, I think we will get better at it as we go along :)

 

We use it as supplemental work, not our full curriculum. I like it. I hope that helps. Let me know if you have more specific questions about what we are doing.

[Heidi @ Mt Hope]

We are doing Foundations at home right now. DS loves the timeline cards. We are on week 5 - 40 cards. He messes up a few in the middle, bit it is going well. The book and Cds are more of a struggle. We laugh at the songs, a lot! They are catchy and we find ourselves humming them occasionally. I am n t stressed about full memorization of all of it right now. We will do the full cycle 2 times with each child. By then, ds will know it. He does better memorizing what we have studied. He is not as motivated to memorize as he would be if we were with a group once a week, reciting the memory work. This is our first year for any memorywork too, I think we will get better at it as we go along :)

 

We use it as supplemental work, not our full curriculum. I like it. I hope that helps. Let me know if you have more specific questions about what we are doing.

 

We are doing CC with a group, but I have to say that the work the tutors put into making the memory work, well, memorable :001_smile: has been great for us. Some stuff is easier than others, though. The Latin and English grammar, for instance, is the toughest. But what I was going to recommend is thinking of either word pictures or hand motions (the kids are often good at coming up with their own!). It helps *tremendously.* For example, one of the tutors had kids memorize the Latin prepositions this way: in-in (sign language for in, that one's easy :)) apud-with (PUT (say it like you have a cold :lol:) your arm around a buddy and say WITH) per-through (picture an arrow through a pear), sine-without (picture a cross as Jesus died WITHOUT SIN(e)). OR for three types of muscle: put your fist up to your heart and make it look like it is beating for cardiac, rub your stomach for smooth, and stomp your feet for skeletal. Or do stick drawings on a whiteboard. It can be very simple, and often simple is best, but doing those things are absolutely necessary for us to memorize that amount of information. Otherwise it all starts to run together. :001_smile:

[Jim]

We have two in CC, our ds 10 is in his second year and ds 4.5 is in his first, though he did sit in on his brothers class last year and listened to the cds a bunch. (He doesn't sing the normal songs for his age but has replaced them with history sentences such as the 1980 and the rise of conservatism :001_huh:) They enjoy it have have been able to memorize large chunks of information easily, even the 4yo.

 

They enjoy seeing new friends and learning in a class environment. I see the improvement in their ability to retain information and how they can do it easier as time goes by.

 

Brain training is what I'm after. The actual info is a bonus.

 

If I were to do this at home I would try to carry as much of the CC info over to our studies. I would consider using the time line cards and history sentences as a history spine. Whether I did it myself or used IEW I'd use this as our foundation for writing. In fact, in Essentials they are using IEW's history sequence.

 

There is art/music study and I'd expand on it.

 

I'd do the same with science. The science cards have been about various systems within the body and they have been coloring them. Soon they will trace their bodies and put the organs where they go (cool).

 

They do latin through memorization but it would not be enough on its own. I'd drop it and use a different program.

 

Geography is great. Last year they did countries, rivers, and mountain ranges in Europe. This year is states and capitals. Easy to expand on.

 

Grammer has been mostly parts of speech. It's not enough as a stand-alone so your back to a different program with the CC stuff supplementing the basics.

 

You could do all this...

 

OR..

 

If you , like me, are after the skill of retaining chucks of information you might consider a poetry memorization program (IEW or you own homemade one).

 

Just my .02 cents.

[campmom]

Yes, foundations is easy to do at home. You can get all of the materials that you need from the CC website. You only need the foundations guide, which is expensive but you use it for all three cycles. The other things are extras so you can get as many of them as you want, but you can do it without any of them. You can do as much or as little as you want. We did cycle 3 at home last year and enjoyed it. This year I am going to pick and choose the parts that I want to do. We haven't started yet for this year.

[hsmom2011]

n/m

[campmom]

I was just thinking about this and I guess you would need the VP history timeline cards if you want to do the timeline because that information is not in the guide. Of course you could make up your own timeline. There are also videos on you tube.

[laughing lioness]

There are lots of threads about this already. We do a lot of memory work at home. I actually like selections from Living Memory better than CC, though my younger kids listen to the CC CD's regularly, so they have most (all) of the history sentences done. I have used a white board in much the same way a CC tutor would (I used to direct a CC program). You can see that here (it's not a great pic).

[laughing lioness]

Still getting views from this thread so I thought I'd update. We joined a CC community this year- foundations and essentials and it's been great. I have regular posts about CC. I'm tutoring Foundations and plan to tutor Challenge A in the fall. 

It's been a great fit for us this year as I've been working from home. It's part of my support system for getting it all done.