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!!

Our Classical Conversations Co-Op

Stock photo

This year, our homeschool Co-op is going to be using the Classical Conversations Foundations as it's guide. We are an unlicensed, modified, group.  I want you to know, right off the bat, that I highly recommend a true licensed group and can see the benefits of it. Many in our group simply could not afford it.  I will be highlighting a lot of what we do in our group this year here on my blog, and I want to be able to reference this post, with all the details of what we are doing, so I don't have to repeat myself every time I post :).

What we are doing with our group:  

We meet once a week for an hour and a half.  We accept ages 3-12 (most only being 3-9).  We do not charge a fee.  We require purchase of the Foundations guide.  We recommend that each family purchase the audio CD or Resource CD and the timeline cards-I believe all the families have done so.  We also require parents to be teachers, room moms, nursery workers, and snack teachers.  

Each parent is required to sign up for a 6 week teaching slot in one of our classrooms.  We have created a slot for just one Fine Arts teacher, who teaches all the different classes.  The kids leave their memory work classroom to go to the Fine Arts classroom so she does not have to move.  We also offer a nursery to facilitate all the moms with kids.  Oh, we have a different Fine Arts teacher for each of the 4 Fine Arts subjects.  We teach Grammar, Timeline, History Sentences, and Math.  

We do NOT offer Science, Geography, or Latin. We do NOT have paid tutors.  We do not require a parent to be in the class at all times-just a room mom.  We do not have enough parents to require them to be in the class and fill all our other needed slots of teaching, nursery, snack, etc. 

We begin our group with an assembly where we say the pledge, pray, and do a family presentation (this is the only presentation that we do).  We also learn Greek as a group.  

There is a licensed group about 40 miles away that just started this past July.  I HIGHLY suspect that we will end up acting as a feeder group for those that can afford to do the full CC program to go into their group.  Our group came as an idea for something better and different then the basic preschool program we offered last year.  Some of the families could afford the full CC program, but had never heard of it before.  Some, couldn't afford the full program if they wanted to.

Now, when we started talking about using the CC program, we had about 25-35 kids in the mix that we thought would be involved.  When we shared with our co-op what we were offering for our young students this year, we had over 50 kids sign up!!  We should have seen this coming since 2 years ago our group consisted of-get this-10 kids total!! But we still weren't expecting 50.  The 50 doesn't include the 14 children we have in our nursery!  

It has been a huge challenge to figure out how to organize such a big group of students when we ourselves had never used the CC program at all.  So, I can totally see how having a paid group of tutors and organizers would be very helpful!!  I have no idea how much the directors or tutors get paid in a true CC group, but I am sure they earn their money!!  

I am so thankful to be able to offer our unlicensed group to our Co-op as our ministry.  So many of our moms are brand new to homeschooling and have no idea where to start.  It is nice to give them something to work with at our group and expand upon at home.

You will be seeing many posts this year concerning our group as I share with the other moms in our co-op group and with many friends who are considering CC in their areas.

Thanks for stopping by!

God Bless :)