My Chocolate Moments

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Classical Conversations Cycle 3 Week 4

Here’s an overview of what we did at home for Classical Conversations Cycle 3 Week 4, Foundations and Essentials

It’s about at this point in the year that it can start to feel overwhelming.  Truly, four days in between community days just does not feel like enough time to get it all done, does it?  Good news…you don’t have to!  Like I’ve mentioned in other posts, it’s totally fine if you skip things.  It’s also fine if you find something your kids are interested in and camp out there rather than “keeping up” with where CC is.

As I’ve shared we are slowing way down with geography and just doing two states a week – we’ll still be learning about states long after CC has moved past the 50 states and that’s fine!  Last time we did Cycle 3 we went over the states, didn’t even learn them to mastery, and that was it.  My boys were really into American History so most of our effort was spent there.  This time around I want us to really master and learn about the states so I’ve made that more of a focus.

As for history…for example, Liberty’s Kids is 40 episodes – episode 1 starts with the Boston Tea Party (week 3) and episode 40 is about the Declaration of Independence (week 4).  We certainly won’t watch 40 episodes in 1 week so we’ll be watching those long after we’ve “moved on” from that time in history.  That’s ok!  Your kids may get really interested in the Revolutionary War era…camp out there and read nonfiction books and fiction books and watch videos and do projects if you want.  That’s ok!  You can keep memorizing the CC history sentences each week while really focusing in on something from earlier that your family is wanting to spend more time on.

Ok, there’s your pep talk for the week!  Now, let’s move on to what our family did in week 4.

(Note: some of these things link to documents on CC Connected.  If they do not open for you, make sure you have logged in to CCC first, then try my link again)

This post contains some affiliate links.  If you purchase a product through an affiliate link I make a small commission at no cost to you.  Thank you!

classical conversations cycle 3 week 4

FOUNDATIONS

The majority of these things I’ve shared about in my Cycle 3 prep video and blog post.  If you haven’t seen those yet, you might want to check them out because they go over these things in lots of detail.  This post is going to share how I put them into practice in our weekly/day to day homeschool.

Reviewing our memory work

We sing through/talk through our memory work together once each day.

Hands on memory work

I have several memory work hands on activities.  On the first day after community day we use them as we go over the memory work, then on the other days I keep them in a container and the kids take turns putting them in order/playing with them independently when I’m working with one of the other kids on other lessons.

History – They put these history cards in order on the white board

Science – These velcro matching activities

Latin – We used the large set of the Latin matching activities with magnets on the back for this week’s set of words and started using the smaller set of prepositions/conjunctions & adverbs/verbs velcro matching to review the previous weeks.classical conversations latin match

Timeline – I never even got this week’s set of timeline cards out so we didn’t scramble them up and put them in order.  We did listen to the timeline song almost every day which is something we don’t do most weeks so, you know…you win some, you lose some ;)

Geography – Tracing dry erase maps and doing the quizzes/games in the Seterra app.  Seterra is really helping them master those states and capitals in a way nothing else has!

map tracing

Worksheets

The kids work on a few CC worksheets each day, usually while we’re listening to memory work or I’m reading from our 50 States book.  They do:

CC worksheets

Expansion

Here’s how we expanded on our memory for week 4.

History – We watched some Liberty’s Kids.  There are 40 episodes covering events from the Boston Tea Party to writing the Declaration of Independence.  You can watch them on YouTube or buy the DVDs or see if your library has them (they are available through the Hoopla app at my library). liberty's kids classical conversations cycle 3

And we watched some Drive thru History (we watched the 2nd episode about the pilgrims so we’re “behind” but remember, that’s ok! (if you have CC Connected you get a free membership to RightNow Media – the Drive Thru History videos are on RightNow Media)

Geography – We are using Notgrass’ Our 50 States curriculum alongside CC this year.  Our 50 States covers 2 states a week so it goes slower than CC, which covers 5 states in a week.  So for us this week looked like:

  • Read Unit 4 of Our 50 States (New York and Pennsylvania) (we do this as a read aloud – we don’t have the workbook and haven’t done any of the other activities so far)
  • Watched the Homeschool Pop episodes for New York and Pennsylvania (these are 5-7 minute videos on YouTube that give a brief overview of each state: nicknames, flag, state bird, facts about the state, where it’s located, etc.)
  • Watched the State Plate episodes for New York (season 2, episode 4) and Pennsylvania (season 2, episode 8) (State Plate is free on Amazon Prime and it is SO FUN!  Our family is loving these!  Each episode is all about iconic foods from each state.)State Plate Classical Conversations Cycle 3

See all the State Plate + Notgrass Our 50 States match ups here

  • The New York recipe from our United States cookbook was Waldorf salad – looking at the ingredients (mayo, celery, apples, lettuce, and some other stuff) it sounded like something no one in the family would like so we punted on that and bought a New York style cheesecake instead…yum!  We’ll also be making pretzels for Pennsylvania but haven’t had a chance to make those yet.cheesecake

We will cover Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana once we get to those states in our Our 50 States curriculum but if you want to do them all with week 4, here’s the info:

To see all State Plate match ups for all weeks of CC Cycle 3, see this post.

Science – We watched the video about nerves and electricity on Awesome Science TV (Awesome Science TV is a science video subscription – there is a whole playlist of videos that are made to go along with CC’s science sentences – season 3 episode 4 goes with cycle 3 week 4)

Books

I have several cycle 3 booklists that I use (they’re all linked in my Cycle 3 prep post) – I check our library to see which of those books they have and request those.  I also use the library’s search and search for words related to our topics  to see what else our library has that are applicable.CC cycle 3 week 4 books

As a reminder, these are not necessarily the “best” books that pertain to this week but it’s what my library had.  Make sure you check the booklists I’ve linked because your library may have others on those lists.

This week I checked out/pulled from my stash:

History related books:

Geography related books:

Science related books

ESSENTIALS

  • One of the worksheets from Onward each day (the ones labeled 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3)
  • Copied chart F and verbally went over chart A
  • Did week 4 from this homophone worksheet
  • Edited the history sentence (located in this week’s Onward)
  • Did one ATS (analytical task sheet) sentence each day.  In community they used their ATS trivium tables but at home my son has been preferring to use the preprinted ones from Onward.
  • Went over the IEW vocab and took a Vocab quiz
  • Wrote his IEW paper (KWO on day 1, rough draft on day 2, dress ups on day 3, and final draft on day 4)
  • I mentioned a few weeks ago that I bought Sequential Spelling and we started using that this week.  So far so good but we’ll see how it goes as we get deeper into it.

Have a great week 4!

P.S. Don’t forget that it’s ok if you don’t do all of this stuff or all of the things you have planned!  Your child(ren) will still learn SO much and you can always save those things you didn’t get to for weeks when you’re on break.

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