Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Getting Ready for the School Year!!

Well, with only one week before the official start of Maddy's first grade year, I still have some more to do to prepare!! I feel like I have two different "jobs" to do for this year, or more!! I have to get Maddy's first grade year prepped, get prepared for tutoring Classical Conversations, and I also am going to start doing some "school" with Judah this year!! He is so smart, and is picking things up constantly!! I am also going to start doing Spanish with both of the kids this year.
Like I have mentioned in earlier posts, I have a LOT of curriculum from my mother-in-law who has been homeschooling since my husband was in 2nd grade and she still has 4 kids she has at home doing school!! So I began putting together what I had for this year, and ordered a few things that I needed. I have yet to go and get a Social Studies book/workbook for this year. I went to Starbucks one afternoon and worked on some lesson planning for the first 2 weeks. I decided that since I have so many little books on different topics, that we will do unit studies for science, and add what we need. So for the first unit study, we will be covering a book on birds, insects, plants, etc. We are using Saxon Math 1, History for Little Pilgrims, Sing, Spell, Read, and Write for Language Arts, a Health book, and some other workbooks for things like manners, time, and money.
Preparing for Classical Conversations is something different altogether. I have about 6 weeks of material to get together and I need to come up with games for each subject I teach to get the kids to memorize the material I am presenting. Then, it's the parent's job during the week to help their kids memorize that week's information. Over the 3 cycles, they are memorizing a plethora of material in Geography, Latin, Math, History, a History Timeline, English, and Science that they can use later on when they are older. They are pegs of information that they can later hang things on. This is the way they explain it. I also am teaching Fine Arts and Science Experiments. So for the first 6 weeks I teach drawing, the next 6 weeks are Tin Whistle (like the recorder), and the final 6 weeks are Orchestra, which is a group class. So I have my work cut out for me being new to CC and being a new tutor!!
We start a week from today! And CC starts next Tuesday! I am ready and excited to be getting into our Fall routine, chores, schedule, and back to school!! 
If you have any questions about how we do school, why we do school, or what our daily schedule looks like, just leave a comment for me below!!

4 comments:

  1. Hey Steph!
    I teach piano to three homeschool kids who are very involved in CC, and it's AMAZING to me what they've picked up. They are so much smarter than I'll ever be! I credit it to CC and their mom who's also a tutor. I'm so excited to hear that you're getting involved this year too! I hope it's a great experience for your whole family.

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    1. I am excited to see how it will be for Maddy this year, and to see how much kids really are capable of memorizing large amounts of information!! It is going to be a challenge having it be my first year of tutoring and our first year in CC but it will cause me to rely on the Lord!! So good to hear from you!

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  2. I am mom to a soon to be 4 year old. A lot of his friends are off to Kinder, and here he will be unable to attend K at the public school not for another 2 years due to his early Sept birthday. Meanwhile the kid can read fluently at a late 1st grade level and loves to memorize things. In one day he learned this song where you say the name of a dinosaur for every letter in the alphabet. All this to say, I am completely completely lost on what I am suppose to be doing and I am thinking Classical Conversations maybe is the answer. Can people join mid semester? Is it a semester thing like Fall and Spring? Or is it a yearly thing? Do we now have to wait til 2013 being we didn't Aug/Sept 2012? I wish I wasn't so lost on our next step.

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    1. I talked to our Director and she said that you can join CC. But for ours, she said it is based on availability so if you were interested you would want to visit soon and get signed in. Because each class can only have 8 kids, so there is a limit.

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