Classical Conversations at home

Since we have been living in Malawi, where there is no Classical Conversations community with which to do our community days we've been taking a slightly different approach to using it as a "spine" for our classical learning. We review Cycles 1-3 throughout the year (we already went through each Cycle while in a community back in North Carolina). I've put together a schedule that works for us.

We correspond our "read aloud" time to a different time period in history every day of the week. Here are some of the favorites:

Here is our current weekly schedule:

Curriculum and life update

We have been living in Malawi, Africa for over a year now!! My husband is working on a USAID contract working with early grade literacy in the country. We have continued using Classical Conversations at home, and enjoy a lovely home-school cooperative here in Lilongwe that meets once a month. I teach Spanish, writing and ballet classes to small groups. It has been a great adventure. CJ has a fabulous piano instructor that comes to the house 3 times per week, an art instructor that comes to the house once a week, swimming at our neighbors pool with an instructor and karate at a local school. We live on a compound with 6 other kids, so having other kids around to make forts with, build things, collect snails and lizards, climb trees and generally just be kids has not been a problem at all. The kids here on the compound mainly only speak Chichewa. CJ and Naomi only speak a little but they all somehow communicate flawlessly. I wanted to update this site with a curriculum guide I put together. We get an amazing education allowance through my husband's work, which has allowed me to buy materials we never could afford before. Our favorite part of the day continues to be an hour or more of me reading aloud to CJ and Naomi while they build with Legos, draw or just play quietly. We have a wonderful collection of books we have been able to buy with our education allowance, which is especially needed here as there are no libraries in Malawi. This is a very brief description of what we have used during the grammar stage with CJ since 2012: Curriculum Overview for the Grammar Stage of Learning (ages 4-9)

Spanish counting resource

I've been making lots of Spanish resources lately for some of the Spanish classes I teach and thought I'd share some of the links I have found useful. This link takes you to printable flashcards of numbers 1-100 (I printed and laminated them): http://www.easynotecards.com/print_cards/372.

The Classical model... a visual

This diagram helps visualize what the Classical Education model is. I liked this visual and got it from this post: http://family.yourway.net/what-is-a-classical-christian-education/ Here's a snip from her post: While the stages roughly conform to the elementary (grammar), middle school (dialectic) and high school (rhetoric) levels in the education model, we all actually progress through these three stages naturally whenever we want to master a new subject. For example, if you’re learning to cook, you must first define the kitchen tools, terms and measurements used in recipes. Then, you begin to gain an understanding for why recipes are written in certain orders — why we mix the dry ingredients separately from the wet ingredients when making muffins, for example. And finally, you’re able to create your own recipes and teach others to cook. For more details on the model of Classical education I'd recommend going to the link above because she does a great job explaining the stages and how it works in her home!

Bilingual Homeschool Group

I facilitated a Spanish geography class during the "Home-school Learning Lab" at our library today. What a great group! Seriously, we are lucky to have such a wonderful community right here. This super awesome library is Durham County East Regional and the Children's librarian, Tanika schedules and coordinates the Home-school Learning Lab. It is every Thursday 9:30-10:30. They have had classes on gardening, composting, fruit anatomy, Math riddles, library scavenger hunts and other fun things! I usually leave CJ in the group alone as I chase Naomi around the library during the hour. We usually have a little over a dozen students ranging from age 5 through high-school age. We had a lot of interest in starting a bilingual home-school group here in Durham, so I started a yahoo group just now called Bilingual Home-school and uploaded a few bilingual workbooks I've made you can access once you join the group :) If you would like to join the group and can't find it by searching yahoo groups: bilingual homeschool Durham NC, send me an email at otanna@gmail.com and I'll send you an invite!

English/Spanish World Map

We do geography on a weekly basis through Classical Conversations. One thing we try and incorporate to our home-school days is tracing and free-hand drawing the world map. I just made a Spanish version of the world map we've been using and am super excited about it. I also made a blank template with just the latitude lines for practice drawing the map free-hand in the correct placement on the map. Here is a picture of the Spanish map. I uploaded the pdf file to Teachers pay Teachers thinking many other educators may find this helpful in their classrooms/homes. I have the maps in sheet protectors on our school desk for tracing with white board crayons. I am so excited about this :)

Quizlet

Quizlet.com is an amazing resource. It is a place to search for and make your own virtual flashcards. You can then play speed games and/or just use the cards like flashcards to learn the material. I've been translating the cycle 2 memory work for English, Latin and Science for this school year and have been putting the sets on Quizlet. CJ's profile name is warriorknights.