A Dive into Our First Year of Classical Conversations

Homeschooling can really be a daunting time, and picking out curriculum can be downright confusing. It took me a long time to finally land on a curriculum that I loved! For our first year homeschooling I really wanted something that encompassed a community within the curriculum. It was hard to find that perfect "fit" but when I finally started exploring Classical Conversations I knew we had found our fit. To read about the reasons we landed on Classical Conversations, check out the post Classical Conversations Homeschool where I go into great detail about our decision.

If you are considering homeschooling your kids and are interested in Classical Conversations, there are some great pros to this learning style and community! I'll go through my favorites and some of my least favorites below!

Curriculum

This was one of our favorite aspects of CC! We started CC in Kindergarten and it ended up being the year for Cycle 1: Ancient History. Throughout the weeks we travelled through ancient Rome, ancient Africa and all the way to the exploration of South America. My curious little learner had an amazing time delving into the History memory work but CC is so much more than just History!

Each week we had memory work in History, English, Math, Geography, Science and Latin and it was up to us how far we wanted to explore each topic. English, Math and Latin ended up being the memory work that we just learned the song and moved on since we already cover 2 of those topics daily in our regular curriculum. History, Science and Geography however, were the subjects that we ended up rolling our sleeves up and diving deep through books, experiments and documentaries!

Story of the World chapter that went along with the history work one week

I love that each week's memory work is fun and engaging. I also love that it is left up to the family how far into each topic we go. If you have another history curriculum that you like, you can simply memorize the songs and move on. But I love how History is laid out in the CC curriculum so that we can view world history as one giant timeline instead of separate parts.

In the coming year, we will move from ancient history to explore the medieval period, and I am eager to see how my son's inquisitive mind will delve into these subjects! Overall, we thoroughly enjoyed the curriculum offered through CC. Going to community day to learn together with a group and then broadening our studies at home was really a great way to dip our toes into these core subjects!

Hands on Learning

While a lot of the classical model of education is memorization the first few years of elementary school, the hands on science and fine arts components of CC went above and beyond. I highly suggest joining some form of homeschool coop that does hands on science experiments in a group setting. If left up to just me, I never would have had my child disect an owl pellet or a crayfish. Not because I am against these things but simply because I would have had no idea where to source them. (side note: I did learn that you can grab owl pellets for dissection off of Amazon--who would have ever thought!)

I'm so thankful for the amazing group of moms in our community that came together to make all of the hands on learning projects a huge sucess! One week they even created an entire gem mine on the campus for the kids to learn about geology and rock/mineral identificiation! As you can imagine, the kids had an absolute blast on that short unit.

Fine arts was the other hands on subject where we switched between art and music concepts in the first semester to studying famous artists and composers in the second. The hands on art unit was so much fun and it was amazing to see how creative people are!

Resources

Classical Conversations feels like a giant community of homeschool families that are there to help support you in your journey no matter where on the globe they are from! One of the things that blew me away is how generously everyone shares their gift in this community. Once you join your CC local community you have access to the website CC Connected where very talented CC families share their resources. From handwriting sheets and coloring pages to supplemental learning and curriculum pairing, people have graciously shared their resources with the community for free! I was able to download so many different resources for our weekly studies that there were some that we didn't even have time to get to. If you are a CC family already and haven't looked into CC Connected Shared Forum, I highly suggest you check that out for your Cycle 2 materials!

There is also a lot of great resources on Youtube and other blogs that you can utilize to make your year successful! The Homeschool Helper Youtube is our go to for the weekly memory work songs and timeline song! CC's bookstore is also a great resource for supplemental materials like the Story of the World series and workbooks that align with the weekly history memory work. So while not free, it still gives some great options if you need more meat in your homeschool day.

Small Groups

While some of the CC communities are rather large (like the one we first visited) our community felt like just the perfect size. Probably around 20 or so families, the classes were small and intimate but there was enough people for events etc. I'm not a very outgoing person so having a smaller size was a lot less stressful for me! It wasn't too small though so my very outgoing son would constantly come up to me and say, "Mommy, I saw this person that also goes to our church or trail life". My son's class had around 7 kids which was a great small group to learn together!

Least Favorite

As much fun as we had with CC there were a few aspects that were not my favorite but these more revolve around my families schedule etc. Our community day started at 9am and ended at 12pm, but once we got home both me and my son were pretty tired and drained from a full morning of learning so doing other lessons was not an option. Normally, I wouldn't mind this because we only needed 4 days of math and language arts to complete the year in a timely manner but it prevented us from taking off and exploring on Fridays (like the zoo, museum, gardens, hiking etc) This is also mostly my fault because I also overscheduled us signifigantly our first year of homeschool where we had something 3 out of 5 days. We quickly realized that some things had to go once the exhaustion set in! But I'll spill all the tea with that in an upcoming post. As my son gets older I believe this will also help with the mental exhaustion factor so that we can plan those "exploring" days!

Our family is also in an area of the city that does not have it's own CC community so the few of us that live downtown have to travel to a different community. This is just me being nit picky but it would have been nice if we all lived in the same general vicinity but it seems that our little area of downtown is the outlier in this situation. Many of the other communities in our greater midlands have people that all live near each other. If you live out in a smaller town our country, perhaps you are already used to this. Again, that is just me being very nit picky.

Overall, we had a fantastic year at Classical Conversations and can't wait to go back for Cycle 2! What was your experience with CC? If you have any supplemental questions, please don't hesitate to leave a comment! I LOVE talking all things homeschool :)