This week was the second week of our fall break, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t do any school work at all. On Tuesday’s we have school with other homeschool families in a community called Classical Conversations.
The method of schooling classically was new to me until Savannah’s first grade year. I had done her kindergarden year “out of a box”, an all inclusive K5 program, and we were both very bored with that approach. I began researching other avenues and stumbled upon Classical Conversations in a way that only God himself could have ordained.
A classical education trains the mind. The goal is to teach my kids how to learn anything they want, and ultimately be able to articulate their beliefs on any subject they are passionate about.
In the early years, classically educated children do a lot of memory work. This is the time when the building blocks for all other learning are being laid. Their minds are like sponges, ready to absorb information. Children at this age actually find memorization fun. So we spend the majority of our time learning facts. Rules of phonics and spelling, rules of grammar, poems, the vocabulary of foreign languages, the stories of history and literature, descriptions of plants and animals and the human body, the facts of mathematics — the list goes on.
At the end of the year, each child is given the opportunity to become a Memory Master. This means that they are able to recite every single bit of information we learned over 24 weeks, including the scripture passage and time line cards (of which there are 160 cards, beginning with creation and ending with modern times, with all world events in between).
This is a lot of dad-gum information and even the thought of reviewing it with my kids on a daily basis is overwhelming to me! But Emery and Savannah have both told me that they would like to try to be a Memory Master this year, so last week while we were on vacation, I took a couple of afternoons and made us a memory box and folder with all the facts we are going to need to know.
Wish us luck!!!!
