Our Classical Conversations Co-Op

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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 :)