Our Visit to Classical Conversations

Okay, guys.  I have had a homeschool dilemma for the past couple years.  See, I have long considered myself a “classical educator,” in the vein of Susan Wise Bauer.  Her book, The Well-Trained Mind, has had a profound influence on my homeschool philosophy, and I use a lot of principles of classical education when teaching Math, Handwriting, History, and Grammar.  In fact, the Grammar series we’ve been using since we started homeschool is by Susan Wise Bauer.

So of course, I was extremely intrigued when I started hearing about Classical Conversations, a weekly homeschool program that, while not associated with Bauer, strives to introduce the principles of classical education into homeschooling.  I heard so many good things about the learning community, the resources, the memory work, and the overall rigor of the program.

However.

From the first month I decided to homeschool, I also fell in love with Sonlight’s curriculum.  I love their literature-based, History-based model, and their tagline, “The way you wish you’d been taught,” really resonates with me.  Spending my childhood immersed in great books, learning about my world through incredible stories and lively discussions?  That is the way I wish I’d been taught.  And I love giving my children the opportunity to learn that way.

So that’s been my conundrum.  Both Sonlight and CC are fairly pricey.  And also, their curriculum does not line up well.  CC follows a repeating, three-year cycle of Ancient History, Modern History, and American History.  This year, they were on the American History cycle.  And guess what?  So was our Sonlight!  But next year, they are switching to Ancient History, and I will still have another year of American History with Sonlight, which I will not give up under any circumstances.

Are you asleep yet?  Because this is riveting stuff to me.  My two homeschool philosophies--rigorous, memory-based classical, and laid-back, literature-based Sonlight—are clashing in my mind.  However, my bff, Courtney has spent about a year trying to convince me that they can merge, and I think she sealed the deal this past week.

Courtney’s boys are doing CC this year, and next year, she will be the director of their center.  She’s been begging me to try it out, and I have to admit, the prospect of doing CC with the Steeds is a lot more tempting.  So on Thursday, I agreed to visit her community…and fell in love.

My kids were both in Courtney’s class.  Her board had their memory work for the week:

But before we got to that, the kids had to go and do their weekly art project.

They studied the technique of Roy Lichtenstein.

He was a comic book guy who did a lot with dots and onomatopoeia.

After learning about him, the kids did their own dot art, using paint and the erasers of pencils.

Anna loved it.  She was the last one done, in fact, and would have kept painting for another hour, I think!

After art, it was off to do their weekly Science experiment.

Today, the kids were using iodine to test food for starch.  They followed the scientific method by first forming a hypothesis and sharing it with the class.  Then, they each used their own iodine dropper to test their hypothesis.

Once finished, they shared their conclusions with the class.

Then, it was back to the classroom to go over this week’s memory work.

Next, it was time for presentations.  Each week, every member of CC gives a presentation to their peers.  In the Foundations level, where Luke and Anna are, the presentation can be on anything.  It’s almost like Show and Tell.  Its larger purpose is to get kids used to public speaking, preparing remarks, keeping within a time limit, taking questions, and things like that.  Of course, my kids didn’t have to give a presentation, and Luke chose not to, naturally.  However, after hearing the others, Anna decided that she did want to give a presentation.  She got up and talked briefly about her sewing machine.

She was tickled pink to take questions, and was so pleased that someone asked if she had made anything.  That meant she got to share with them about her Valentine pillowcase she had made with Gaga.

After presentations, it was time for a memory review game.  This week’s game involved a huge “gameboard.”

This was one of those “crazy Anna” moments.  She and Nolan briefly shared the same square, and Courtney joked that they would have to snuggle together on the square.  This was Anna’s spontaneous response:

Keep in mind that she had never laid eyes on any of these kids before this morning.  It was amazing how comfortable she—and Luke—were.  I think having the Steeds there was a huge help.

At the end of session, the kids had a mini-Valentine exchange. 

My kids didn’t come prepared, of course, and none of the others knew them.  But they did get Valentines from Tyler, Canon, and Josh (Thanks, Courtney!), so they were pleased.

It was such an inspiring morning, watching my kiddos paint, experiment, memorize, present, play, and genuinely enjoy themselves.  And I especially loved the learning community, something we’ve been missing since our tutorial closed down last summer.  I am definitely going to continue to use Sonlight for our main curriculum, but I think CC will provide a nice, weekly refreshment of art, science, memory work, and community.  We look forward to starting in the fall!

First Day of School 2014-2015

As with many milestones, I am torn with the first day back to school this year.  Part of me is shocked that the new school year is already upon us…but I think a bigger part of me was ready to get it started! 

This day was a little different than the two years previous.  I really like the first day of school to be a big deal, complete with some kind of outing or celebration afterward.  However, when planning for this date to start, I didn’t realize that Greg would be out of town with his interns.  That threw me for a bit of a loop because things just don’t seem as “big” when he’s not around.  Also, had he been here, I probably would have run out and gotten a few extra surprises the night before.  But it was not to be.

Secondly, we were supposed to go to a cool state park with our friends, the Steeds, to “celebrate” our first day of school.  Unfortunately, they’ve been down with a stomach bug since last week.  Courtney herself was very ill on Sunday, so we sadly had to scrap our plans.

Without all the hoopla, I was a little worried how the first day would go, since both kids were decidedly unexcited about it.  However, when it comes down to it, none of us can help ourselves:  we love the first day of school!

I think it also helped that we had a little devo the night before on Colossians 3:23.  We talked about how working “wholeheartedly” at our tasks brings glory to God and discussed the difficulties of working wholeheartedly at things we did not want to do.  But we ended the devo determined to do our best to work wholeheartedly even at tasks that seemed unpleasant to us.

And I’m proud to report that both kids worked “wholeheartedly” all day on Monday!

I decided to do a few things differently this year.  For one, I have really spent the last two years focusing on reading.  Now, with one in first grade (doing second and third grade work) and one in third grade, I feel like I can hang the “Mission Accomplished” banner with reading.  They both love to read and are very proficient at it.  So now, it’s time to turn to writing.  Of course, they know how to write, and have done written work in school…but they don’t love it.  It’s more of a discipline for them, and they aren’t as proficient as I would like.  This year, then, we are really going to focus on writing in all of our subjects.  To start us off on the right foot, I’m trying a new thing where they have a writing notebook and copy a sentence into their journal every morning.  My summer reading on classical education has really sold me on the value of copywork, especially when it comes to understanding sentence structure.  Thus, each day I plan to choose a sentence or two from our reading (which they then get to “spot” later) and have them copy it to practice correct punctuation and effective sentence structures. 

They copied their sentence right after breakfast (after labeling their new notebooks), and then went to clean their rooms and get ready.

Here is the schedule I came up with for the day.  It turns out that it needed some tweaking, but it gives an idea of what all we did.

But first, I had to take a “first day of school” picture.

The kids chose to wear the new clothes that Gaga got them, and I’m glad they did because those clothes look very comfortable!

Another new thing this year is assignment folders.  We do a lot together during school:  Bible, History, Read-alouds, Readers, Grammar, Spelling, and Science all very much require my presence.  However, I’m aware that the ultimate goal by the time the kids graduate is that they are self-motivated, self-directed learners who are in charge of their own education.  Thus, I knew we were going to need to take some baby steps toward independence this year, so I decided to give them folders to find the assignments for all the things they could do independently.

These worked surprisingly well—at least on the first day!  Anna, especially, loved the idea of a folder and was dying to do some of her independent work.  And Luke quickly learned the value of working ahead in his folder so as to have more free time at the end of the week. 

But first, we needed to have our reading session:

Unlike the past two years, Sonlight’s Bible section this year comes directly from the Bible, so I’ve decided to follow it.  We seem to be going through the book of Luke, so on Monday, I read the first 25 verses to the kids.  Then it was time for our “History” book, Pedro’s Journal.  It tells the historically-based, yet fictional story of a boy on the Santa Maria with Columbus.  It was a good story, but by the time we were finished with Bible and History, Anna’s summer-diminished attention span was done.  She was dying to work from our folder, so we stopped to do math.

I really think their folders make them feel empowered, and I’m hopeful to see how this develops over the years.  My current curriculum choices require lots of parent involvement, which I think is great, but I do think that there will be a shift as they get older.

After Math, we went back and did our Read-aloud and the kids’ reader.  I’m having them both read to me from Sonlight’s readers, since they are geared (along with the Read-alouds) to correspond with our History.  It also saves time to do it together.  Thus, I hold the book (A Lion to Guard Us) between them, and they take turns reading pages.  Neither of them loves to read aloud, but they both need the practice, and the book has a good storyline.

After our books, we moved on to Language Arts.  We are using First Language Lessons, level 3, which is the first one that comes with a workbook for the kids.  Of course, I’m happy about this because it means more writing.  And since it’s a classically-based curriculum, there is also dictation and copywork, which I like.

After that, it was on to All About Spelling.  AAS is more kinesthetic, but even it includes sentences for dictation.  I’m having Luke do them, too, because—again—we need to work on writing!

It was lunch time after that, and then Quiet Time.  Last year, the first half of quiet time was used for quiet reading.  This year, I’m having them do a brief journal entry in their writing notebook before they start (I’m sure you’re sensing the theme here).

After quiet time, they referred to their assignment notebook for their cursive handwriting sheet, and then we moved on to Geography:

I have loved studying World Geography these past two years, but I’m also excited to move on to U.S. Geography this year.  To start off, I had them label all the states they knew.  Here is Anna’s:

The goal is by the end, they will know the names of all the states and capitals, as well as the states’ locations.  This was a fine start, though.  I also took a picture of Luke’s, although he was helped by the playing of, “Fifty Nifty United States” on youtube.

Afterward, we read Scrambled States of America and played the game that goes with it.  The kids loved this game.  It’s really fun, and it does a good job of familiarizing them with the states.  Rigorous education it is not, but it definitely doesn’t hurt!

We closed the day by reading the first lesson of our Earth Science book and making paper mache globes.

I wrote on Facebook that after doing them, I have an all-new appreciation for my elementary school teacher who did them with a whole classroom!  It is not that hard with two kids, but it is awfully messy! 

This is our first layer.  We will do the second and third on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then paint it on Thursday.

After they finished that, their exercises, and their piano practice, the day was over.  I was surprised that neither of them had any expectations—or apparently desire—to go out and do anything, so I left them to play on their own (and for Luke to enjoy some well-earned screen time).  For dinner, we made our own ham and pineapple pizzas, which is always fun:

We ate early so that we would have time to go to a park and ride our scooters before bedtime.  The kids rode and rode—and I got my exercise by making a couple laps around the park with them!

It was a great day, despite all my initial worries about it not being “big” or “special” enough.  Seeing my kids’ enthusiasm reminded me yet again why homeschooling is perfect for our family.  They can (and do!) complain about school, but the bottom line is, in the big picture, it really does make us all so happy.

Here’s hoping for another great year!

Home Education

All parents educate at home.  I realize this now.  After two years of homeschooling, I can see how almost everything is a learning opportunity:  when my kids’ work mad libs on a child’s menu at a restaurant, they are reviewing grammar; when we play Scattergories, we are practicing vocabulary; heck, there’s even logic involved in several of Luke’s video games!  Homeschooling has helped me see and appreciate these little learning opportunities so much more.  And it’s also made me realize how easy it is to orchestrate learning activities that include the whole family.

For instance, this summer, we started nature journals.  My goal is that we add an entry a week that, at minimum, consists of a sketch and a couple of sentences about something we have found in nature.  The first week, we took a close look at the clover that is taking over our yard.  This week, we decided to investigate where all the little fuzzy seeds are coming from in Nashville.  They look like snow and feel like cotton, and they are swirling constantly at several nearby intersections, including one the next street over.  It was time to investigate. 

First of all, you must understand that I know nothing about nature.  It’s pathetic.  My parents are voracious gardeners, and my dad loves nature and can identify any tree, shrub, and flower.  In the meantime, I’m like, “Ummm…that’s a rose…and I think that’s a sunflower…”  Seriously, it’s bad.  I feel just slightly unqualified to teach about nature…but that’s why I have Google and my dad, right?

So anyway, I had googled the fuzzy seeds and had come to the conclusion that they were poplars.  And Greg had confirmed that one recent place we had seen them had a huge poplar tree nearby.  So…step 2 was to find a poplar!

Armed with photos from the internet on my phone, we took off on our quest.  The first tree that I saw that sort of looked like a poplar, I took a picture of and promptly sent to my dad:

The pics I had seen of poplar leaves had four points, and this one had five, so I took a picture, and texted it to him, asking, “What tree is this?”

The answer was, “Tulip Poplar.”

I decided to further enlist dad on my quest.  “We are looking for the trees that have these seeds:”

Dad was like, “Those are cottonwood seeds.”

Hmmm…I know better than to question my dad’s knowledge of seeds, but, you know, I had the Google, and it was telling me poplar.  I contented myself with taking pictures of every tree along the way and asking him, “Is this a poplar?  Could the seeds be coming from here?” 

I’m sure he was thrilled to stop everything he was doing, receive my onslaught of pictures, and engage in arborial analysis with me…but he’s a good dad, so he went along:).  You can’t tell in the picture above on the right, but it is swarming with seeds in the air.  This is what the ground on the side of the road looked like:

We were getting close. 

It involved a wee bit of trespassing…

…but we found the tree!

The mystery was definitely solved, at least in my mind.  However, dad whom I may have mentioned knows much more about trees, was not yet convinced.  For one thing, poplar seeds look like little pinecones.  For another, it’s not seed time for poplars.  In the meantime, those seeds perfectly fit the description of cottonwoods, and he could describe the leaves in minute detail.  When I texted him the picture of  the seeds, he was sure:

It. was. a. cottonwood.

“Text me a pic of a leaf,” he said.

My phone rang.

“You took that leaf and those seeds from the same tree???” 

“Yes, I promise I did.  They were both attached!”

In the meantime, I was screenshotting pictures from Google to text him…

However, since he called before I texted him, we ended the conversation with an agreement that I would google cottonwoods, and he would google “poplar seeds on tree,” and then we would compare notes.

A few minutes later, dad calls back:  “We have a poplar!”

I don’t know if this conveys through blog post form, but I cannot tell you how fun this all was.  The quest, the mystery, the confusion…the googling, the figuring out of stuff with my dad.  It was pure education.  All of us learned something, even dad!  I, who am horrible at tree identification, will always be able to spot a poplar now…and so will my kids.  In fact, they did just that at a birthday party we went to that night!

With our pilfered poplar leaves, we made leaf rubbings to put in our nature journal.  Both kids wanted me to write “Poplar” in cursive on paper, so that they could copy it into their journals.  They are just learning cursive, but are first learning the letters separately, so this was one of their first full words.  And Anna was totally enamored by the idea of leaf rubbings, and she and I spent a good amount of time afterward picking out leaves from around the yard, and making rubbings using different colored crayons. (I refrained from texting pics to dad for identification, figuring his patience with my endless photos only went so far.  I had already sent him nine!)  Luke even joined us for awhile, before returning to his Lord of the Rings video game to complete the dubious accomplishment of finding his way on foot from Gandor to Hobbiton. 

So let’s see…in one afternoon, we exercised, studied lots of trees, learned to positively identify poplars, practiced cursive, and discovered leaf rubbings.  That’s a lot of learning to come out of a simple nature walk. 

And lastly, a funny story.  I was telling Greg’s dad today about our discovery of the cotton-seeded-poplars, and when I described the seeds, his dad said conclusively, “That’s a cottonwood.”  I said, “No, it turns out that it was a poplar.”  And he gave me a look of complete disbelief, and I’m not sure I ever actually convinced him!

The Last Bit of Homeschool

Ahhh…it’s good to be done with school.

Of course, I still love homeschool!  And we are actually going to keep up some things during the summer (including learning cursive).  But it does feel good to wrap up a year’s worth of curriculum.  For one thing, I feel like the kids learned a ton, and I like having that feeling of satisfaction.  For another thing, I’m already looking forward to next year and I’ve put off a lot of my planning because I really wanted to focus on ending strong.  And lastly, our spring schedule has, frankly, made the academic side of homeschooling more difficult! 

Here’s how we spent our last week of school:

This picture is, of course, from Mother’s Day.  It’s not really school-related, but I show it because I was so impressed with my family.  Greg has been in China since Friday (grad school requirement), and he managed to arrange a Mother’s Day surprise with the kids.  Thus, when I woke up Sunday morning, these are the things I found on my kitchen table.  I loved the roses, chocolates, and card, but my favorite thing might have been the Panera gift card.  I love Panera, but I’m the only one in my family who really enjoys it…which means I only go by myself.  It was so sweet of Greg to think of it as a place to eat Mother’s Day lunch…and sweet of the kids to eat without complaint!

After church and lunch, we went with some friends to see “Lyle the Crocodile” at the Children’s Theater.

We got to go because some other friends from church had ten extra tickets to give away, and I was able to snag them and get a friend to join us.  Viviana, me, and our kids only made six, but they were happy to have someone enjoy those!

There were six seats toward the back and four right up front.  The kids decided that they wanted to sit up front, which was fine by us.  They were also in view; you can see Anna’s big blue bow in the picture on the left.  Before the show started, they drew for door prizes, and Anna was tickled pink to here her name called for a t-shirt.  Even though it was too big, she wouldn’t hear of exchanging it for a smaller one!

On Monday after swim lessons, we were supposed to meet our friends, the Steeds, at the science center.  However, because all the public schools seem to take the same view of the end of the year as we do, there were approximately 78 school buses there (<------- maybe a slight exaggeration).  But it was packed to the point that Courtney’s kids wanted to leave shortly after arriving.  We were still on our way at that point, so we decided to meet them at nearby Ft. Negley to do some geocaching.

Even the geocaching didn’t work out extremely well (long story), but we had fun exploring the fort and eating a picnic lunch before coming home to finish up Grammar and Science for the year.

That night, I filled up water balloons for the kids Field Day at tutorial, which was a testament of my love for them.

The picture on the right is of them right before leaving for their last tutorial of the year!

They loved Field Day.  Luke’s favorite event was a relay where you had to sit on water balloons, and Anna’s was a relay involving passing a full sponge over their heads and between their legs.  As it was sunny and almost 90 degrees, it was understandable that water would figure prominently in their favorite games!

We came home and watched The Sound of Music for school.  It’s the only WW2 set movie that I thought appropriate for their ages.  We watched an hour and a half that afternoon, and the kids loved it.  We had to cut it short, though, to go to soccer practice.

During soccer practice, Anna worked on her balance beam skills:).

That night, we watched a little more of The Sound of Music in bed on the iPad.  We finished it up Wednesday morning, before having a lesson extravaganza:  first, there was our swimming lesson (we reviewed our Latin cd on the way).  We went straight from swimming to piano.  While one took a lesson, the other reviewed math on the iPad.  Then we came home for lunch and quiet reading.  Next, we headed to gymnastics, and then straight from gymnastics to church.

Then, it was home to pack because we left bright and early Thursday morning for Gaga’s house!

;

School’s out!  It’s officially summertime for the Kirby household!