Classical Conversations Tutor Ideas: Week 1

As I mentioned yesterday in this post, we are using the Classical Conversations curriculum with our Co-Op this year (read the post for details).  My class is a group of Kindergartners.  I was supposed to have 10, but only 7 showed up.  I did find out that I will have one more this next week because one of my Kindergartners accidentally got assigned to a 3/4 class.

It was my very first week teaching, and had never seen anyone else teach the CC program either.  All of us moms were a bit nervous, but it seemed to go pretty well.  I was amazed at how well-behaved my little crew was!  I'm really looking forward to spending the next 5 weeks with them.  I just might have to sign up for another session afterwards ;).

While they are with me, my group works on the Grammar, Timeline, and History memory work.  We also work on the Math.  We are supposed to get 20 minutes for review and 20 minutes for new work, but we kinda forgot to build time into our schedule for moving from one activity to another.  Then, both the opening and our fine arts class ran over, so by the time they reached our memory work room, we had about 30 minutes left.  I think this will be about what we have in the future, so we will see if we need to cut our snack time down a bit!

I am specifically sharing what we did so that my other moms in our co-op can read about it.  We are all new and trying to find out how this is going to work :).

I made each of our rooms a modified tri-fold board.  Brandy at Half-a-Hundred Acre Wood has a great post about making tri-fold memory boards, and I thought it would be great to supply each of our classrooms with one.  So, I made boards using foam board from our local Dollar Tree.  Since we are only doing a small bit of the subjects, I only needed a small board.  We set the time line cards on our whiteboard rail.  The memory boards are an extra help since we do not have the time to write out the work on the white boards.  Two of our classrooms don't even have whiteboards.  The one above is like the boards-I left the real ones at the church so I don't have to haul them back and forth.  Our real boards have page protectors.

Since we plan to do fun things to review our work from past weeks, I will begin each new week with something kinda boring, Grammar.  I decided to use my finger pointer to help keep their attention.  I would read part of the definition and then point to my students to have them repeat after me.

Next, we worked on our Timeline.  I didn't take a photo of the cards, but you can see them on the CC website-they are beautiful!  We went through our cards, and then learned motions for the first 7 events. If you are looking for motions to the Timeline Song, check out this videos in the CC community.

Moving on to the History Sentence this week, I gave each of my students a printout of the first 5 Ten Commandments.  I found this page in the CC community during their free days.  

I also gave each student a colored Popsicle stick to point to each number as we went through them.  We read through them a few times and then listened to a song of the words.  My crew really can't read, so I am hoping to bring their attention to the numbers and photos.  

I made this game to review the commandments next week.  My own kids are enjoying it at our house, and doing very well with it.

For math, I printed this page from the CC Community, but it is also on the Resource CD that I purchased from CC.  We went over this page with the pointer, and then with our music CD.  The kids REALLY liked the counting song!

Then, we finished up with counting mats I printed from the CC free Community weekend.  They would be easy to make, which is good since I was only able to get the first 2 weeks of mats...week 3 I'll have to make my own!

I had intended to have the students cover each turtle with an eraser turtle, but we ran out of time to do this part.  Maybe next week.

This took up our time super fast, and I had virtually no interruptions either.  I am not sure how to fit everything in next week, but I'll let you know how it goes :).

Thanks for stopping by!

God Bless!!