It’s hard to believe that we only have FOUR weeks left of Classical Conversations this year! We have had a great experience with the curriculum, so I wanted to share our thoughts with any other families who might be considering the program for their own young children.
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This is A’s Kindergarten year. She turned 5 in June and had been reading for nearly a year before that. She has an amazing (!!) audio-visual learning style; she can easily match pitch, remember song lyrics, and describe an illustration in a picture book perfectly.
After three and a half years of watching her easily quote Signing Time videos word-for-word, I knew immediately that a classical education was something I wanted to try with her. If your child memorizes easily, Classical Conversations will likely be an excellent fit.
Last spring, I read Leigh Bortin’s The Core for the first time. Her educational standards are extremely high, but they resonated with me immediately. Even though I excelled in the public school system, I still feel like my own education has a ton of gaps. I am thankful that I love to read and learn on my own, and especially grateful that I get to learn right along with my daughter as she goes through math, science, and history lessons that I don’t remember.
(Sidenote: my 8th-grade history teacher played the School House Rock “Preamble” video at the beginning of every class, and to this day, I have it memorized.
Our minds are much more capable than we give them credit for!)
In addition to our language arts and math curriculum, A and I spend about 30 minutes a day on her Classical Conversations memory work. We play Review Game for 20 minutes, and she usually has one copywork page for each subject to complete each day. We also attend our three-hour community day on Mondays—which includes fine arts, science, presentations, and memory work review.
In just 20 weeks of Classical Conversations, I have watched my five-year-old memorize HUGE amounts of information. And it’s not just that she’s memorized random facts; she is starting to notice mentions of people, places, and events everywhere: books, videos, billboards, you name it!
During a church lesson, she heard mention of Alexander the Great and could immediately put the story into context of the Greek Empire. Woodrow Wilson? He was President of the United States during World War I! Skip-counting by 13s? No problem with a simple little tune.
We were even able to discuss Newton’s First Law of Motion while reading a picture book last week (a horse stopped running and his riders flew off his back onto a haypile). These are obviously not items typically covered in Kindergarten, but A loves the challenge!
Our goal for Kindergarten is to memorize the Timeline song (14 minutes long), most of the math and history sentences, plus Ephesians 6. Next year, when we work through Cycle 3, two of her seven subjects will be a simple review! (Math and Timeline repeat through all three cycles of memory work.)
Have you heard of classical education? What was the last thing your child memorized?
This post was originally shared on my previous blog (lonestarsigners.com) on February 24, 2014.
