How to Make a Classical Conversations Memory Work Yoto Card

We recently got a Yoto player and my kids are LOVING it! One of the things I was super excited about when we got it was the fact that I can put our Classical Conversations memory work and other CC songs on Yoto cards for my kids to listen to on their own. Today I’m going to show you how to make your own Classical Conversations Yoto card.

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Prefer videos? Here’s a video tutorial!

What is a Yoto player?

I’m going to guess that most people who are reading this are CC families who already have a Yoto player and want to know how to make a card with the CC memory work on it. But in case there are some people who are not familiar with the Yoto player, here’s a brief overview:

In short, a Yoto player is a kids’ audiobook player. The Yoto looks like a little radio and you insert cards, which have audiobooks, music, or any other .mp3 files on them, into the top. They are incredibly simple to use, I know two year olds that use them! To change out the book you are listening to you switch out the card.

It’s not connected to the internet so it’s a safe way for kids to have autonomy while listening to audiobooks and music.

You can purchase books directly from the Yoto store or you can get audiobooks from other sources and make your own card.

You can also use the Yoto to listen to podcasts and certain children’s radio stations, set an “ok to wake” clock for your child, set timers for brushing teeth, cleaning up, etc.

There is a mini version (what we have) and a larger version. The mini is less expensive and the features are nearly the same (the larger version can be a night light and the mini can not, that’s really the main difference).

What is a Yoto Make your Own card?

In addition to cards with books preloaded, Yoto also sells blank cards, called Make Your Own (MYO), that you can load your own books, music, and recordings on. So, audiobooks in .mp3 format from places like Libro.fm or Downpour, songs from iTunes or cds you already own, recordings of grandparents reading books aloud, that sort of thing.

And, for us homeschoolers, we can use them for some of our homeschool content!

How I can use a Yoto player with Classical Conversations?

If it’s in .mp3 format you can put it on a Yoto card! That means I’ve been able to put our weekly CC memory work, the timeline song, presidents song, and states and capitals song into playlists for our Yoto. My kids are able to listen independently to their memory work or other CC songs. They love being able to listen whenever they want rather than only when I play the songs from my phone like we used to do. It has been a huge hit!

Yoto Coupon Code

Don’t have a Yoto yet? Here are some ways to purchase – I recommend shopping around to look for the best deal as it can vary.

Of course you can purchase from the official Yoto website. This is *usually* the cheapest option if you use my 10% off referral code linked below:

YOTO COUPON: Get 10% off your first purchase of $69.99 or more on the Yoto website with this link.

However, occasionally Amazon and Target will have sales that make it a bit cheaper than the Yoto site so check on that (Amazon had the mini on sale during Prime Day and Target sometimes does 25% off one toy that can apply to the Yoto or other similar coupons)

How to make a Classical Conversations Yoto card

Ok now on the good stuff that I think most of you are here for…HOW do I get our CC memory work onto a Yoto card?! Let’s get in to it.

I’m going to show you several ways to make Classical Conversations Yoto cards, starting at the simplest option and moving toward the “harder” options (though all of them are very easy once you get started)

What you need

To get started you need a Yoto player, at least one Make Your Own Card (you can very easily switch out the playlists on the MYO card so technically you only need one but it’s likely you’ll want more than one – I’ll show you why as we go along), your phone, and a computer.

First up: Content

The first thing we’re going to do is gather our content (aka the songs/audio you want to use). You don’t have to do this, but to keep myself organized I made a file on my computer with folders for each week (weeks 1-24), a folder for each subject (i.e. history, Latin, etc.) and then had a few other random items I wanted to include.

There are a lot of ways to do this but this is what worked best with my brain. I wanted to have the content by weeks as well as by subject so the kids can listen to our current week all together but also all of one subject at once for review.

Now that you have your folders set up (if you chose to do that) let’s start filling them with content. Where are we getting that content? Here are some options:

Option #1: CD

If you already own the Classical Conversations cds and that’s what you want to put on your Yoto player you’ll rip the cd onto your computer to change the songs to .mp3s. Now, I don’t have the CC cds and can’t tell you how to do that so you’ll need to Google “how to rip a cd into .mp3s” or something like that and follow those instructions. Once you have that done you’re ready to put them on your Yoto (which I’ll explain later in the post)

Option #2: Digital audio files

If you already own the digitial versions of the CC albums then you can just drag and drop them onto your desktop (you may need to download them first then drag and drop)

Option #3: Official CC Songs/Audio in the Learning Center on CC Connected

As long as you are a member of a CC community you have access to CC Connected and all the songs/audio that are on the cds, digital albums, and app are FREE in the Learning Center! Wahoo!

This was the hardest part for me – I saw people saying they were able to download the .mp3s from the Learning Center to put on their Yoto but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out HOW. I looked and looked all over and couldn’t see how to download them. I thought I wasn’t going to be able to do this route and was super bummed.

What I finally discovered was that I couldn’t download them in Safari (my preferred browser) but I *could* download them if I accessed CCC through Chrome. Hooray! A solution!

*note: using Chrome worked on my computer, but neither Chrome nor Safari worked on my phone. I have seen other people able to download from the Learning Center on their phones but I think they did not have iphones like I do, so give it a try with your phone and see if you can*

So, use Chrome, log into CC Connected, and go to the Learning Center. Go to the Foundations tab and start at week 1.

From there you can pick what you want to download.

If you are a “I want this as simple and quick as possible” person you can use the “All Strands Memory Work” – this has all the memory work (history song, skip counting song if applicable to that week, and the rest is all spoken, including the timeline) back to back in one file. The pro to this is that you just have to download one thing for each week and you’re set. The con is that most is spoken, not sung, and you have to listen to the whole track together (you can’t easily listen to just the history or just the geography if you want to hear it individually)

Click on it, scroll down to the black box with the “play” arrow, click on the dots on the right, and select “download”. This will download it to your downloads folder and from there you can drag and drop into the correct folder(s) you want it in.

If you prefer to have each subject individually, you can do that from the Learning Center as well. Click on each individual box (history, math, and so on), download each audio file, and put them in your folders for the correct week/subject. Like with the all-in-one option, the history and skip counting (math weeks 1-11) are songs, the rest are spoken but now they’re in separate files so you can put them in whatever order you want and skip around to ones you want to listen to.

Also in the learning center you can download the complete timeline song (week 1 – “Timeline Song – All Ages – All Cycles, All Weeks”), the timeline song broken up into smaller sections (week 1 has Age of Ancient Empires, week 8 has the Middle Ages, week 13 has Age of Exploration/Monarchs/Enlightenment, week 16 has Age of Industry, and week 23 has Age of Information and Globalization – these are handy if you don’t want to listen to a chunk on the timeline song, especially toward the second half of the year, without having to listen to the whole thing), the states and capitals song (week 1), and the presidents song (week 24).

This takes some time but is pretty mindless (click, download, drag/drop, repeat) so turn on a show you’ve been wanting to watch or a favorite podcast and just knock it out.

You can download all that and be done. Or if you want something other than the official CC memory work, keep reading.

For our Yoto I downloaded all the history, math weeks 1-11 (the skip counting songs), the timeline (the whole thing plus the smaller chunks), presidents, and states/capitals from the Learning Center. I wanted songs for the rest of the subjects so I got those other places.

Option #4: Songs from the CC Connected Forums

There are so many amazing and talented CC parents who have created songs for the other subjects that CC doesn’t have official songs for. You can find tons of these in the CC Connected Forums.

You can start by searching “song” in the search button and scroll through those. Or you can narrow it down a bit with search terms like “latin songs” or “geography songs”.

Find the songs you want to use, click on the 3 dots next to them, and download (like with the Learning Center, this did not work in Safari for me, only in Chrome – and in Chrome it gave me an error up at the top right corner so each time I had to click “try again” and THEN it would download correctly. So, a little tedious but do-able). Sort them into your correct folders.

Now, if you aren’t married to any specific songs then I’d recommend finding someone who has done songs for all 24 weeks for a particular subject (or weeks 12-24 for math, weeks 1-11 for Latin since those have other songs elsewhere) and just downloading all those.

I, however, can’t do anything easily and we have songs we already know and love for almost all the subjects so I spent foreverrrrrrr hunting through everything to find a song here and a song there to get the right combination of songs. Some I still couldn’t find and had to record myself (I’ll share about that more in minute)

Here are some links from CCC to get you started:

The timeline song broken down by weeks (even though we have the full timeline song on one of our cards I put these in our weekly playlists so we could just hear the snippet from that week)
All 24 weeks of science – here is one option (we don’t have any science songs we were particularly attached to for this year so this is the list I went with – I’ve used Science Girl songs in other cycles and liked them) and here is another
Latin weeks 12-24 (aka John 1:1-7) broken down by weeks if you want that instead of/in addition to it all in one song
Math weeks 12-24 – here is one option and here is another
States and capitals song split up by weeks – I know we’re past this for this round of cycle 3 but in case someone wants it in three years when we do cycle 3 again, here it is.

(If the links don’t open for you make sure you are logged in to CCC first, then come back and click them again and they should open just fine)

Option #5: Songs from other places

There are a few other places that I know of to get CC songs.

If you are a fan of CC Happy Mom and her amazing Geography songs on YouTube you can purchase digital copies of her songs here.

I also love King Things for his scripture memory work songs. We use his John 1:1-7 Latin and English song for Cycle 3 Latin weeks 12-24 and his Genesis 1 song for Cycle 2. You can purchase those on itunes for $0.99 per song.

Can I download CC songs from YouTube?

But what about the CC songs on YouTube, you might ask. I get it – prior to our Yoto player we listened to all of our CC memory work through the CC app or YouTube and I had made YouTube playlists that we loved for several of the subjects. I know a lot of families have YouTube favorites and want to get those on their Yoto.

So can you get those songs from YouTube? Technically you can, there are ways to do it, but it’s illegal so you shouldn’t. I know a lot of CC parents do it (soap box: I have noticed that many homeschool parents, in their quest to be frugal and budget conscious, can be a little…ahem…*unethical* in their use of all sorts of digital materials. As a digital creator myself and former librarian this drives me bananaaaaas.) but really you shouldn’t (unless you have permission from the creator). Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

My recommendation is to:

1) Take the time to search the CC Connected forum and try to find the songs there – many, many of the ones that are on YouTube are also on CCC

2) Pay a little bit for the ones that can be purchased if those are the ones you listen to on YouTube ($0.99 for the King Things John 1 song, $12 for CC Happy Mom’s)

3) Find other options on CC Connected and use those instead if you’re willing to switch (I wasn’t willing to switch so after I exhausted options 1 and 2 I finished up with option 4)

4) Record yourself or your kids singing the songs.

Option #6: Record them yourself

After I found all our songs in the learning center, forums, etc. I was left with a handful from my YouTube playlists that I just couldn’t find anywhere. So my last resort was to record myself singing them.

It was incredibly easy. I used the Voice Memo app on my phone, recorded myself singing each song separately, and air dropped them to my computer.

How do I get the files to my Yoto account?

Finally! You’ve done all this work and have all your files ready to go! Now is the easy part – getting them to your Yoto player.

Log into your Yoto account, go to “Make Your Own”, and click on “Add Playlist”.

Name it (ex. Memory work week 11, CC Cycle 3 English, CC songs, etc.) and click “add audio”.

Find the file on your computer where you stored all those .mp3s you made and upload them.

Click “Create”.

You did it!!

You can make as many playlists as you want. Currently I have one for the “extra” songs (Timeline, Presidents, States/Capitals, John 1, Genesis 1), one for the current week (I switch it out each week – it takes 30 seconds, so easy!), and one for each subject (one for Latin, one for Science, one for History, and so on). You could do one for all Cycle 3 then next year one for all Cycle 1, however it works for you. (You can have up to 100 tracks per playlist/card)

Bonus points:

You can change the icons for each track by clicking on the colorful plus sign to the left. All this does is changes the icon that your child sees on the Yoto player. Definitely not necessary, just a little added extra.
Yoto auto populates a random picture for the cover photo but if you want to make one that matches the content you can make one and upload it. I use Canva to make this simple cover photo (just a picture of the CC memory work I found online and added some text) or if you aren’t tech savy and want some made for you, I put some in my Etsy shop.

*Note* you can also make Yoto playlists on your phone instead of using your computer. However, since I had to use my computer to download the CC Connected files I just did the whole thing with my computer.

How do I get the playlist on to a Yoto card?

Now you can see your CC playlist(s) in your Yoto account, how do you get them to your card? Again, so easy. Grab a Make Your Own card. Open the app on your phone. Click on the playlist and click “link to card”. It gives you the option to use your phone or the Yoto player – I use my phone. You just hold the MYO card near the top of your phone and it’ll transfer the playlist to it. You’ll hear a little beep and see a checkmark. Done!

You made a Classical Conversations Yoto card!

Bonus points:

A lot of people print labels to go on the actual MYO card so their kids can tell what they are. There are various ways to make them (I use Canva) and various ways to print them (handheld printers like the Sprocket are popular, you can print on matte vinyl and cut them out, or print on regular paper then laminate and stick to the card with double stick tape).

If you aren’t much on designing your own, you can grab the ones I made and use those!

You can use the ones in my Etsy shop both for cover pictures in the app and for labels on the physical cards.

And there you have it! That’s how you can get your Classical Conversations memory work onto Yoto cards!

If you’re new to my blog, hi! I share lots of Classical Conversations information, including weekly recap posts with what we”re doing at home (here’s Cycle 3 week 10).

I also make CC hands on memory work activity digital downloads – you can see those in my etsy shop.

You might also like:

How to Put Classical Conversations Memory Work on a Yoto Card

What is a Yoto player?

What is a Yoto Make your Own card?

How I can use a Yoto player with Classical Conversations?

Yoto Coupon Code

YOTO COUPON: Get 10% off your first purchase of $69.99 or more on the Yoto website with this link.