How to use Classical Conversations at Home WITHOUT a CC community!

This is our 4th year using the Classical Conversations curriculum at home and our 3rd year using it without a Classical Conversations “CC” community. There are so many reasons why you might be considering doing this, for us it came down to resources. Our resources of time, our resources of money, our resources of creating and maintaining our homeschool atmosphere.

Of our time, the commitment to a once a week community was not too much to ask of us. However, when you have multiple “once a week” communities in which to manage, something has to give! Our other communities were FREE and just as worth our time as this COSTLY community was.

Creating and maintaining our homeschool atmosphere is of utmost importance, unfortunately, the CC community was not going to contribute to the tone and mood that we desired for our home education journey. This does not discredit anything about CC or the curriculum. Each family must weigh and gauge these decisions. I fell in love with the CC foundations memory work, but I couldn’t justify the rest. Three years later and we are still thriving using this material at home.

However there is just one caveat.

We only treat the Classical Conversations foundations material as memory work.

In short, this is not our only curriculum we use and I do not try to align it to our main curriculum. Nor do I consider it a supplement. It’s our memory work and I treat it as such.

So how in the world do you use this material at home without the CC community tutor presenting it first every week?

Simple. The key is to learn it with your children. That’s right, the tutor has the science and history songs memorized. So will you! The tutor has the math songs memorized. So will you! The tutor knows the Presidents and the Prepositions. So will you! But before you jump ship, know this, it will be incredibly incremental and you can do it!

#1 Throw out the 1 week timeline. You run the show now, and if it takes you 3 weeks to memorize the material, by golly do so. In our experience, we take 1 1/2 – 2 1/2 weeks to memorize each weeks worth of material excluding math. For the math songs we focused on 1,2,3,5,10’s until they were memorized, then 4,6,7,8,9’s until they were memorized which has taken 2 1/2 years to do so. It’s going to be incredibly incremental but so worth it.

#2 Don’t try to do all the memory work in one sitting. Unlike the community day where information after information is practiced in a short period of time. You get to spread this feast out for your children. We practice the Timeline song in the car, and that’s also where we memorized the Presidents. We memorized the Old Testament and New Testament books of the Bible at the conclusion of our morning bible study. To end our math sessions each day we practiced our key skip counting songs and even utilized an abacus to visualize the multiplication happening. Utilize this memory work where it fits best in your homeschool, which is most likely not all in one sitting.

#3 Go ahead and buy the Timeline cards, CC apps and CC songs it will greatly help you learn the material and it provides another outlet for everyone to practice their memory work. A bonus if you buy the songs on your phone you can bluetooth them to a speaker in your house, play them in your car, or in the doctors office while waiting. Anywhere you go you have the songs at your fingertips to practice. Unless you’re the type that still uses CDs then by all means buy the CDs instead, ha!

#4 Place out books on the topic(s). This step is not a necessity but it can add dimension to your learning. If you already have books on the topic you are learning, go ahead and place those in a pile for your children to gaze through. Some weeks I am eager to do this, other weeks I know the topic will be studied at length in the future and the memory work will suffice. Other times our main curriculum perfectly aligns with a portion of the memory work, like learning about Feudal Japan in History and then memorizing the history song about the Heian period of Japan.

#5 Consistency is key. You will no longer have a weekly community to keep you consistently learning the material. There will be no end of the year Memory Master compeition to keep you and your child practicing well into the night, day by day. It needs to be a priority every week or it won’t get done. If you see the value in the memory work and the foundation it’s setting then you will learn these songs right beside your children with or without a CC community. And you might just have fun too!

#6 Do not expect perfection. Your children are beautiful souls not a bag of tricks to show off. Memory work is not the epitome of an education. It is but one tool we use to ignite a spark in creative, imaginative minds like theirs. It is but one tool we use to help them piece together all the wonders of this world, peg by peg.