Classical Conversations Cycle 3 Week 12

Here’s an overview of what we did at home for Classical Conversations Cycle 3 Week 12, Foundations and Essentials

Hooray!!  It’s Christmas break!  We’re halfway through the year!

Now don’t get me wrong, we love CC, but I also very much love our nice, long Christmas break at a bit of a slower pace than during CC weeks.  So I’m excited to wrap up week 12.

If you’re curious what we do over break, check out this post

(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)

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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.

Now that we have a Yoto player we’ve put all our memory work on there and are using that to listen to it every day.  Here’s how I put the memory work on the Yoto.  But for those who don’t have a Yoto player, here’s links to what we use:

• History – The CC app (if you don’t have the app, it’s also here on CC Connected)
• Geography –  CC Happy Mom’s song for week 12 (YouTube)
• Math – We use this song from Youtube
• Science – These songs from CCC
• English – We use this song on Youtube – I love that it covers weeks 5-16 so it’s all in one and by the end they’ve really mastered the irregular verbs
• Latin – We use the King Things Latin song, available on Spotify, YouTube, and iTunes
• Timeline – The timeline song on itunes/the Yoto player (also here on CC Connected)

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 doing them independently while 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

English – Using the larger irregular verbs velcro activity for this week and the smaller version to see the past weeks too

(I also made a really big, whiteboard-sized version and added it to my etsy shop after some people requested an even bigger version, similar to my Latin one)

Geography – Tracing dry erase maps and doing the quizzes/games in the Seterra app.

Worksheets

The kids work on a few CC worksheets each day, usually while we’re listening to memory work or I’m reading something aloud.  They do:

• these memory work coloring pages (use code CHOCOLATE for 15% off the coloring pages)
• this weekly review fill-in-the-blank page (for my 9 year old)

Expansion

Here’s how we expanded on our memory for week 10.

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 13 of Our 50 States (Michigan and Ohio) (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 Michigan and Ohio (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 Michigan (season 3, episode 6) and Ohio (season 2, episode 16) (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.)

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

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

Unit 13 is halfway through the 50 states textbook so we’ll be taking a break from it until after Christmas.  We do have several recipes to catch up on from our 50 states cookbook so we’ll do some of those over the next few weeks but otherwise we’ll just pick back up with our next pair of states in January.

Science – We watched the video about the major purposes of blood 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 12 goes with cycle 3 week 12).

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.

I didn’t get any new books this week – all the ones I got last week were applicable for weeks 11 and 12.  For reference, this is what I grabbed last week:

History related books:

• Shades of Gray
• Abe’s Honest Words: The Life of Abraham Lincoln
• Honest Abe LIncoln: Easy to Read Stories about Abraham Lincoln
• Big Bad Ironclad
• Who Was Abraham Lincoln
• A Light in the Storm: The Civil War Diary of Amelia Martin
• The Civil War: Visual Encyclopedia
• If you Lived During the Civil War
• Eyewitness: The Civil War
• B is for Battle Cry: A Civil War Alphabet
• Louisa May’s Battle: How the Civil War Led to Little Women
• I am Abraham Lincoln
• Major Impossible
• The Battle of Bull Run: Interactive History
• Lincoln Tells a Joke: How Laughter saved the President and the Country
• The Magnificent Mischief of Tad Lincoln
• Magic Treehouse: Civil War on Sunday
• Magic Treehouse: Abe Lincoln at Last

Reminder: I do not read all or even most of these books to my kids!  I put them in a basket in our school room for them to peruse.  One of their school tasks is to read out of that basket of books for 15 minutes and of course they can (and do) like to read them during non-school time too so most of them get read, or at least looked through, at some point.  Sometimes I’ll read one aloud to everyone but mostly they’re there for the kids to read on their own.

ESSENTIALS

• One of the worksheets from Onward each day (the ones labeled 12.1, 12.2, and 12.3)
• Reviewed several charts (his tutor gave out a chart review activity for over the break so we worked on that)
• Did week 12 from this homophone worksheet
• 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.
• Reviewed the IEW vocab
• We did not do an IEW paper this week but I did have him go back and do the poem from Unit 4 that we skipped during that week
• no spelling or editing this week

Whew!  Essentials has been amazing, he and I are both loving it, but I was definitely ready for a break from IEW!  These last two units have been hard – creative writing it not my thing (and not his at this point either) so the last two weeks were harder.

Have a great week 12!

Winter break plans

To see what we’ll be doing over the break to review, check out this post and/or this video

 

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