Classical Conversations (CC), week 3-9

  I think we are finally getting in the CC groove at our home, so I thought I'd share the fun we have had the last few weeks.

This went with week 3's history sentence about the Boston Tea Party. This has been our favorite craft so far! My four year old even took his to his CC class for presentation and recited the entire sentence on his own.

Our favorite book from the library:

fun ways we have learned skip counting:

  

Our favorite review game that works at home AND at CC:

I wrote #1- #7 on the sticks for the appropriate weeks, and then I picked ONE category (History was first). At home I let my boys pick one stick each at a time, we did the history sentence that went with the week # they picked, and then I let  them put a piece of Mr. Potato head on his body.

 At CC, I have 7 kids, so they each picked a stick with #1-#7. The first round, they answered history sentence questions and put a piece on when they answered. The second round, they answered science questions and put a piece on when they answered. I took a picture of "History Mr. Potato Head" and we compared it to our "Science Mr. Potato Head" and they decided which one they liked the best.

 For week 8 game at CC, I prepared the snowball fight game for my kids at CC. I wrote questions on half pages of white paper. I had two teams (Team Olaf and Team Frosty) behind two different tables that were facing each other. When they answered the question as a team, they took turns rolling the paper into a paper snowball. At the end of the game, they had a snowball fight.As you can guess, my 6 year old thought the game was the best thing ever! He even wrote/drew about it the next day in his weekly journal:

So if you didn't already realize, I am a tutor at CC.

 Here are  3 examples of my weekly memory board for class time:

Two things make me giddy/happy: when CC and MFW (My Father's World) lessons correlate really well, and when my kids sing the CC songs because they want to.

He was SOOOOO excited that his words to learn from MFW was "to do" since we had just learned how to conjugate "to do" at CC!

My family could be a commercial for Mary Bryant songs:)

Singing Mary Bryant's circulatory system song to his baby cousin:

We also enjoyed going on our own Lewis and Clark Expedition (tying in the MFW Friday nature walk), finding new to us things, naming them, and drawing them in our nature books

-  like a weird looking fungus and a yellow spider.

Thank you , Lord, for this beautiful world you gave us to explore. May we never take it for granted.

First Grade Fun with My Father's World

The last few weeks (MFW week 6 through 9) have been full of first grade fun, including several field trips:

Mercier Apple Farms

 LST 325 Memorial Ship

and our Chattanooga Warner Park Zoo

At home we have been doing A LOT of reading. For anyone that is worried about how slow My Father's World phonics moves in kindergarten, get ready, because it picks up a lot of speed in 1st grade! This is a good thing, as I believe all that work we did on learning short vowel sounds in kindergarten makes learning all the other rules in first grade so much easier. 

 He was not a fan of learning the words "girl", "her", and "sister":)

The boys discovered that the leftover paper from making the above world looked like a crown. I decided to make our reading review more fun by writing the words in different colors on the crown, so he read them all  before he put it on.

Of course there is math, but since I have a lot of unifix cubes, he has been having fun building the patterns that go with the math problems. I think he is a little genius, since he immediately discovered the color pattern it made when told to find all the ways to add blue and black together to make it add up to 6 (or 7, 8, or 9 the following days).

 The boys both LOVE doing the math with Sunshine Cafe and Rainbow Food Center. They constantly ask if they can play restaurant or grocery store now.

My favorite part is our beginning Bible time. We read stories from this precious book, that works towards character development with stories about animals:

We also learn a Proverbs each week, which doubles as the copy work.

Poor kiddo, week 6 was scary as the word "honeycomb" looked impossible to him. I covered up half the verse and put a tic-tac at the end to encourage him. It worked!

Here is week 9's verse, which came not a moment too late! We have been dealing with outbursts of anger, so I will review this scripture all year long!

We learned that the Bible is made up of 66 books by looking at 66 books together (they were in two piles for Old Testament and New Testament- just to give a visual)

It is not part of My Father's World, but we also keep up with a weekly journal. We did this last year too, and it a tradition I hope to always keep. Oh, and yes, he is wearing pajamas in all three of these pictures. Home-school does have some benefits:)

Our Second Week of Classical Conversations ( CC, cycle 3, week 2) and a Minecraft Art Lesson

Week #2 was SO much fun with our CC group and at home. 

Most of our review time is spent saying and singing, but we also like to do worksheets. I find if we use different methods (verbal, written, visual,etc.) it sticks in our memories better.The printables you will see all come from the wonderful ladies of CC Connected.

My 6 year old's journal entry about the CC review game time:

History:

 This is a homemade Mayflower my kids decided to make just for fun:

Math and Latin:

Science (yes, they gave the skeleton clothes):

The take home from our community for art (mirror image) 

and science experiment (water drop magnify glass):

And then we decided to have fun with Minecraft and mirror image art at home:

I drew one side:

 and then my kids drew the other side, 

teaching them how to draw shapes with symmetry:

 They didn't want to stop!

And that was our week 2!