If you happen to have noticed that I haven’t been around much lately, I do apologize. I keep thinking that I can make this space a priority but the reality is that most of the time, I can’t right now. I am deep into my Master’s degree at the moment. In fact, I am spending my summer preparing for my final two classes and writing my thesis. It has been the most exhausting and exhilarating experience of my life!
I am getting my Master’s in classical education, and specifically in literature. This means I have had to do an awful lot of reading over the past two years–with plenty more to come this fall, when I tackle both Children’s Literature and Drama while also doing the preliminary research for my thesis. Not to mention spending time with my daughter who will be a senior this fall, teaching my middle child to drive, directing Challenge 1, doing school with the youngest, etc. It’s going to be a very VERY intense fifteen weeks around our house. But we all know that, we all agreed to it together and we are all doing what we can to prepare for it.
For me, that looks like freezer cooking, decluttering the house, and doing ALL the assigned reading now so that I can just review it this fall. I’m not a fast reader–and I am especially slow when I “have to” read something. Doing it over the summer will take a lot of the pressure off of me. I highlight like a madwoman so I can just review my highlights and carry on.
Anyway, all of that and I haven’t even gotten to my point yet. Sometimes I have to read something that intimidates me. And if you are trying to give your kids a classical education when you yourself have not had one, I am sure you understand what I mean! This past semester I had to read The Odyssey for the first time and I was scared to death. This fall I have to read Doctor Faustus and some other rather intimidating-sounding titles. Sometimes I start to panic. And then I remember, we’ve been teaching our kids how to approach intimidating-sounding material classically for years! It’s time to do the same for myself! So here is what I’ve come up with for how to approach classical literature and the specific things I found for Doctor Faustus that helped me out. My plan is to add more to this series and share what I did to approach each one.
Step 1: Watch the play (if it is a play, that is!)
Here’s the thing. No playwright has ever intended people to sit down and read the script. The script is for the actor. You were expected to WATCH the story unfold before your eyes. So watch the play. Do not feel guilty. Do not think you are cheating! It’s a play! This was the intention. What you MIGHT want to do is keep the script in front of you in case there were major edits done, but honestly, even that is not necessary in step one.
Hello friends! As most of you are aware, I sell study guides that go along with Henle Latin. For some reason, Etsy flagged SOME of them as violations of intellectual property. Of course, they are not. Henle Latin is public domain and I don’t even directly quote anything in the study guide anyway. It’s just a help in walking through the lessons. It also seems like a glitch because only the listings I went in to do small edits were flagged–and instantly after editing them.
I tried to contact Etsy about this for over six months and they refused to respond and even closed my case without responding to me. I re-listed my study guides with some small changes and so far they’ve left me alone this time. You can purchase my study guides on Etsy once again. You can also buy them on Teachers Pay Teachers if that’s your preferred site, although it shouldn’t be. TpT keeps SO MUCH of the profit for itself that it makes Etsy’s fees seem non-existent. I think they keep 50% or more. Etsy keeps like 6%. Anyway… the other option is my new stand alone site: ThePlacesWeLearnBlog.Sellfy.Store. I MUCH prefer this site to either Etsy or TpT, but I know some people prefer to stick with a site that is familiar to them, which is why I do list them on all three.
In a lot of the training for directing Challenge, there is a metaphor used that we as directors need to welcome our students to the table and invite them to feast. And that sounds positively lovely. I love to think about the time we spend in conversation as a feast.
But in real life, it can be difficult to put that into practice. In fact, in Challenge A and B, I’m not so sure I did a great job of it. I’ve continued to learn and I began making changes in Challenge 1 and 2 that have greatly improved this idea of welcoming students to the table. Here are some ideas of things that have worked for us.
A quote board.
Personally, I like this one. I’ve also bought lots of extra letters, like this set, so that I can pre-pack the letters I need for each week. I write the quote on a sandwich bag and label it with the week it is for, tuck all the letters inside and then I can grab and go, and put the board together while I’m sitting somewhere waiting on my children at whatever activity they have that day.
In Challenge 1, all my quotes were from Shakespeare. In Challenge 2, the quote was always from the book we had been reading that week. In Challenge 3, I plan to do quotes from the books I’ve been reading for grad school.
I place my quote board near the entrance to the classroom so that they see it. It often sparks conversation. “What book is that quote from?” or “I preferred this other quote from that book.” It gets their brains going before we even begin.
2. A message and meme center.
For a very brief time, we had a host church that gave me my own classroom. No one else was using it at all, and I had a key and could lock it. For that brief time, I had a bulletin board that I got to decorate like a “real” teacher. I loved it. When the church shut down due to Covid and we had to find a new host, I lost my bulletin board. But I remembered I still had my portable white board from back in the days of tutoring Foundations. So, I turned it into a message center. It was always filled with memes to draw the students in, but once they were there, it offered relevant information about the day ahead and also about the weeks ahead. Our school year calendar was posted, and any important upcoming due dates were there. If someone was assigned to lead a strand, that was noted. I also set this up on a table near the door so it would be seen. This really helped the kids stay on top of what was going on.
3. Set a schedule for the day.
There is nothing I hate more than walking into a room where I know I will be for several hours and I do not know the agenda. If I hate it, I’m sure the students do too. So I have committed to always, ALWAYS having a printed version of our schedule on our message center and I keep a copy in front of me. I have noticed far less stress when the kids know what to expect when they walk through the door. Sometimes they will give input, “Next week can we just get debate over with first?” and I try to respect those requests when I can.
Pre-printing it is important to me. I think it shows the kids that I have put some thought and effort into my plans and I am committed to this day and respecting their time.
And yes, of course there are days we do not stay on schedule. Sometimes our conversation in Expo is so incredible, none of us want to jump to research. And I will say, “It’s time to switch, but if you want to keep going, we can give this a few more minutes.” Sometimes they say “Yes, please!” and sometimes they look around and admit, “Actually, that was pretty much all I had left to say.”
4. Assigned seats.
Eek. This one will straight up tick off your students at first. Tough. I found after A and B that my students always sat in the same places. Which meant that when I stood in front of the room and looked straight back, I was always looking at the same face. Not good. Also, they needed to sit next to different people all the time. It’s just good for them to not get in a rut of only sitting with and talking with one person.
I knew that winning them over would be difficult. I decided to make it fun. On the first day of Challenge 1 and again for Challenge 2, I gave them 30 getting to know you questions. I searched the internet for random questions to ask and compiled a different list for each year. It had things like “What is your favorite cookie?” “What is your favorite Christmas movie?” “What’s the furthest you’ve ever traveled?” And then I would use that info to create a seating chart. For those three questions, I would sort like this. For cookies, I looked up each cookie and found out how many calories it has. Then I sat them in order of highest calorie cookie to lowest. For Christmas movie, I looked up the year it was released and sat them in order of the age of the movies. For travel, I looked up the miles from our community meeting location and sat them in order of miles traveled. Every week, they would come in and find their name card at their seat based on an answer to a question. Inevitably, every week, they would ask, “What was the question this week?” and then start discussing the answer with whoever they were sitting next to that week. This gave them not only the opportunity to sit next to someone new, but to have something to talk about with that person so they could get to know someone a little better. They love it now. I have won them over.
The saddest thing is that I will have a small class in Challenge 3, and I might not really need assigned seats. I haven’t decided yet.
5. Catechisms
Catechisms are new to me. I learned about them reading Something They Will Not Forget by Joshua Gibbs. But I fell in love. Having a morning catechism as well as one for each strand helps get their brains going and helps make the transition from one topic to another go much smoother. I have so much more to say about catechisms, but this is already getting far too long. I’ll leave it at “READ THAT BOOK!” for now.
Seriously, this was intense. There were points when I just wasn’t sure we’d all come out the other side. Having short stories due just before Mock Trial, while still keeping up with Logic, Latin, Research, and Math was a lot to take on.
First day of Challenge B!
It got so ugly, I picked up my phone a few times and started to call my Support Rep to cancel my contract for next year. I’m not kidding. I felt like the kids were drowning and they were pulling me down with them.
But, somehow, we all came through the other side. It really brings to mind the lyrics of an old Rascal Flatts song, Stand. “You feel like a candle in a hurricane. Just like a picture in a broken frame. Alone and helpless, like you’ve lost your fight. But you’ll be all right. Because when push comes to shove, you taste what you’re made of. You might bend ’til you break, cause it’s all you can take. On your knees, you look up, decide you’ve had enough. You get mad. You get strong. Wipe your hands, shake it off. Then you stand.”
I am completely consumed by Classical Conversations Challenge B this year. I am directing it, and my oldest child is enrolled it. Many, many things are covered in Challenge B: categorical and propositional logic, the history of astronomy, creationism vs. darwinism, intro to Chemistry, Latin, current events, mock trial, math, persuasive writing, reading novels, reading short stories, and writing one of their own. But overall, what we are truly studying in Challenge B is discipline. All that school work? It is really just the tools we are using as we learn to become disciplined.
What is discipline? In a nutshell, it’s self-control. I sure have collected a lot of quotes about it to share with my class throughout this year. Here are just a few:
So I’ve been sharing these quotes on discipline and giving pep talks to these kids that if they just focus on discipline NOW, their entire lives will be easier because they will have already trained themselves to do what needs to be done, even if they don’t “feel like it.” And then I looked at my own life and said, “Oops.” I have gone way off track lately. And some of it can be excused–I was feeling really lousy for awhile there until I was able to see the correct doctor about some health issues and get my body working properly again. That took nearly six months of appointments, blood work, etc, to finally get to a point where I am a functioning human being again. Hooray! But while I felt lousy, I got lazy. And the thing about laziness is that sometimes it just becomes a habit. At first it was because I felt cruddy and couldn’t do anything. But then when I finally felt better, I looked around and realized that I was still doing NOTHING because that’s what I was used to doing. CC and especially the Challenge program is all about modeling for the kids what they should be doing. We don’t so much teach them and lecture them, we just show them what to do and hope they follow our lead (they usually do).
So here I am, halfway through Challenge B and just now deciding it’s time to be serious about developing discipline. And at first I wasn’t really sure how I wanted to go about that. I tend to get too crazy with my plans and schemes and then I can’t follow through.
I decided to go with a habit tracker. Here’s what mine is looking like at the end of January. Note: this is not color-coded. I just have a bunch of gel pens and grab whichever one is nearby.
Here’s my little habit tracker.
I’ve purposely cut off the image so you can’t see what habits I am working on–every one is different and what I am focused on will not help you develop your own self-discipline at all. We don’t need to compare ourselves. However, I do have some advice on coming up with the items on your list and some general ideas of what I have on my list.
Make your habits clear, actionable, and measurable. Do not say, “eat healthy”. Because how do you define that? One day you may decide that having dessert after dinner is ok because you ate well all day and another day you may decide that you shouldn’t have had cake and therefore you can’t check off the “eat healthy” box. Instead, break it down. Drink 1 glass of water. Drink another glass of water. Drink a third glass of water. Eat a piece of fruit. Don’t eat chips. Don’t drink soda. Make EACH of these items, whatever specific things you want to qualify as “eating healthy” a SEPARATE item on your habit tracker. For one thing, you will be able to keep a clear definition of eating healthy. For another, if you have eat a serving of fruit, eat a serving of veggies, drink water, take a vitamin, don’t eat fast food, don’t drink soda all as separate items guess what? If you mess up on ONE of those items that day, you can see clearly that you did not ruin your entire day. So you drank a soda? Well, you didn’t eat fast food, you had an apple at lunch, and you drank about a gallon of water. One bad decision does not mean you end up making five more. When they are each separate items, you can fail on one and still conquer the others. If you had just put “eat healthy” well then, you are out of luck if you make even one teeny bad decision in your day.
I also don’t say “Do the laundry”. I actually make each step a separate item–wash a load, dry a load, fold a load, put it away. I am trying to develop the follow through of doing one load of laundry a day so that I am never behind on laundry. I have had a bad habit of letting a load sit in the wash until it smells funny. So having separate lines for each step has helped me get into the habit of completing the process.
The same goes for exercise as well. I put each small thing on it’s own line so that I do each thing. I don’t just say “Workout” because that isn’t clear or measurable. I say XX minutes on the treadmill. XX pushups on the Total Gym. XX pull ups on the Total Gym. And so on. Again, this makes my goals clear and then I can follow through on them.
Another category of items on the list have to do with home schooling. We got into a really bad habit of not doing our morning time together and so I put that on my list. We have only missed one morning since I added it to my habit tracker and it was the morning the little guy kept fainting, so clearly we had other priorities that day. The cool thing about this habit tracker is that in the past, I would’ve said, oh well, we broke our streak. Let’s quit because we weren’t perfect. But with this tracker, I am able to say, you know what? I didn’t do it yesterday but I can still get it done today!
Morning school getting done!
I also have a category for blog work. Social media posts are a lot of work to remember and I’d all but given up, to be honest. But now that I put each thing on my list (post to Facebook, post to Instagram, comment on other home school posts on Instagram, pin to Pinterest, etc), I am really upping my social media game for the blog.
Don’t be afraid to have a LOT of items on your list. It may seem overwhelming at first but when you are breaking down “eat healthy” into 7 or 8 actionable steps and “do the laundry” into four steps, it’s going to seem like a lot but it’s actually just going to motivate your more because you get to check off more boxes throughout the day.
I’ve already mentioned a lot of reasons this works but I’d like to point out one more. When you get to fill in little boxes with pretty pens, you get a tiny little surge of “I did it!” and, after reading the book The Power of Habit, I know we need that little reward. That’s why I only use my special pens to fill it in. I personally buy them one at a time at the checkout at Michael’s, but you can buy a multi pack on Amazon. I’m obsessed with these pens!
My favorite pens have their own special home.
I’ve also set goals for myself. I challenged myself to get 600 “points” this month. A point is a square filled in. I didn’t start until a little later in January so I didn’t have a full 31 days to work on it. But I’m still very, very close to reaching my goal. As of publication, I have 533 points and 3.5 days to go. I think I’ll make it!
Over the month, I have discovered some things that were flawed about my list of habits. A couple of things really only need to happen once a week and shouldn’t have been on a daily list. A few things I thought were good goals have turned out to be unreasonable (the amount of water I was aiming to drink, for example, is more than my poor bladder can take!). So I have decided to not be committed to this list for an entire year, but rather, I will edit it monthly to reflect what is going on and where my focus needs to be. Next month I am adding an item called “Do something from your weekly list” and then I will work my way through the tasks I need to get in the habit of doing once a week. More discipline practice!
I have a lot of big projects I’d like to be working on. I am trying to write a super detailed and awesome Disney Vacation Planning Journal. But I was getting so bogged down with my to do list every day that I was never finding time to get around to that. And part of me doesn’t want to get around to it because it’s big and it’s scary and I am afraid of failing at it. So I would just keep adding more chores to my to do list and never “find the time” to work on it. But using this tracker has made me say, “No, I’ve done the laundry, I’ve loaded the dishwasher, I’ve done school with the kids. I have plenty of time to sit down and focus on this project.” I have freedom to work on my projects now.
Wait a minute… the theme of Challenge B is Discipline. And the theme of Challenge I (the year after B) is… wait for it… FREEDOM. Oh. I get it now. LIGHT BULB MOMENT! Discipline brings freedom. Boom. Living that out myself so I can model it for my students. CC life at it’s best!
To make your own habit tracker, you can use notebook paper, graphing paper, a spreadsheet program, or whatever you have available. I use Numbers on my Mac, personally. Anything that allows you to make a list and have a space to check it off daily will work just fine. Keep it simple and follow through! Good luck!
A few months ago, I shared about my frustrations with Kindergarten. You can read all about it here but in summary, it wasn’t going well. I was feeling like a failure and my kindergartener was less than pleased with how we were approaching things. School should not be a negative thing when you are five years old. It shouldn’t even be a negative thing when you are fifteen, or twenty-five, or fifty-five. Learning should always be a source of joy.
But it wasn’t. Kindergarten was feeling like a disaster. It felt that way for the entire first semester. But thank God for Christmas break because my brain was able to get some true rest and reset and think clearly instead of feeling so defeated that I couldn’t even come up with a plan.
I remembered the number one rule of Classical Conversations: KEEP IT STICK IN THE SAND. What does that mean? Keep it simple, Momma. Keep it simple. Kindergarten (and pretty much every other grade) goes a lot more smoothly with less props, less fancy manipulatives, less expensive curriculum. Kindergarten should be about learning to use those little fingers, identifying letters and numbers, and basic math skills. He also listens to the Foundations memory work with the rest of us and participates in our morning basket time that we do as a family–we cover everything from art to math drills to microscope usage during that short time each morning.
So I took it back to basics. We are continuing with Math U See Primer because he is absolutely rocking it and it is a great fit for him. Not all math curriculum fits all math students, so I am feeling lucky that we got it right on the first try with this kid.
We also use Addition Facts That Stick to review the math facts that he is learning in Math U See. Again, we hit math hard because he truly enjoys it. Using an additional math book may not be appropriate for some kids but for him, it works. We really like the penny flip game that practices adding 1 and 2 to numbers. We play it multiple times a day! All you need to play is a drawing of two rows of ten squares, two buttons and a penny. That’s pretty “stick in the sand”!
The only other official curriculum that we are working with is A Reason for Handwriting. I like that every other page is a coloring page and I like that the method they use for teaching handwriting. He seems to like it, although he doesn’t really enjoy letters at all.
Past that, I’ve got some super simple tools that we are using for letter recognition. My kindergarten is having a lot of trouble with letter recognition. I really believe it has to do with all his medical trauma, all the tests, all the doctors, all the appointments. For whatever reason, all that anxiety bubbles up when it’s time to learn letters. So we are taking a very, very simple route to learning letters. It’s slow going and we aren’t getting there as quickly as I’d like. But he is making progress and I can’t ask for much more than that.
First, I found these alphabet blocks at the dollar store. They are super lightweight, and they were only a dollar. There’s plenty of better quality blocks out there but what I like about these is that there are only 9 but that’s enough space to have every letter and 0-9 printed on a side. Actually, there are also math symbols and punctuation marks so I think I must be missing one of the blocks. Ha! Anyway, for a dollar, these can’t be beat. We roll them like dice and whichever letter shows up on top, he has to try to remember the name of. If he can’t, we roll that block again. It only has six sides so eventually, he either rolls something he knows, or he repeats one he had before and remembers this time. He likes it, it only takes a few minutes, and he doesn’t complain about it. Win. Win. Win.
Our other stick in the sand letter recognition game is made with a stack of 3×5 cards and a pencil. Cards = sand and pencil = stick. We’ve got this. So I cute the cards in half, and I wrote a letter on each one. We started with 4 letters and I think I did each one twice, in upper and lowercase, so 4 cards total per letter. And then I added 4 cards with silly faces on them. I punched a hole in the corner and put them on a ring to keep them together (you could also just use a sandwich bag, I happened to have rings in my supplies).
How to play? I flip a card over and he says which letter it is. Then he flips one over and I say what letter it is–this way he’s also hearing me say correct answers, which gives him more exposure. And those silly faces? When we flip a silly face card, we meow! You could make whatever sound you want. You could roar like a dinosaur, bark like a dog, fake sneeze, whatever makes your kid giggle. My boy likes cats, so we meow. So he is always hoping to get a silly face card instead of a letter, and that keeps him engaged in the game. It’s so simple and it’s working! I add two new letters every few weeks, as he gets bored and seems to be mastering what he already has.
Finally, we are working on using those fingers. I read an article about how there is an impending shortage of surgeons in this country because kids are so used to swiping a screen instead of using their hands that there will be no kids left who have the dexterity to operate! How crazy and sad is that?!?
I hit the Kumon offerings pretty hard for this. We did this maze book, which he finished quickly and is begging for the next one. The mazes get increasingly difficult and require more focus and hand control as you go through the book. We are also working on cutting and gluing with this book. And then we are working on folding skills with this workbook. And the great thing is that the paper is nice and thick and easy to hold while you work. You could definitely just print your own things, but I do like the quality of the paper and the way it slowly builds to more difficult skills throughout the book. It isn’t as stick in the sand as drawing a shape on a scrap of paper and having them cut it out, but it’s also not super expensive and the books make him smile. And learning should make kids smile, right?!?
And then, I tuck it all inside a simple 12×12 scrapbooking case I bought at Michaels’ when it was on sale. Normally they are $10 each, but they often go on sale for 3/$10 and that is when I buy them! You can see what they look like on Amazon, but they are far cheaper at the craft store. The only thing I can’t fit in the box is his Math U See blocks, but they have their own carrying case, so it’s fine. I also keep a whiteboard, dry erase marker, pencils, scissors, and a glue stick in the box so everything we need is right there waiting.
We sit down on my bed and open up the box and take everything out. We do one activity from each thing in the box (one page of each workbook, one round of each game). We put each thing back in the box as we finish and when everything is back in the box, he is DONE with school for the day. Or so he thinks. Playing is learning and so he’s really still doing school when he plays with his toys. He just doesn’t know it.
October is upon us. The school year is not so shiny and new and exciting anymore. We aren’t tired and bored yet (I hope!) but we’re finding a groove and getting comfortable with what works–and identifying what does NOT work.
I am directing Classical Conversations Challenge B this year. It’s incredible, for so many reason. I am falling in love with Challenge B and I didn’t think anything could top Challenge A!
Much of what the kids learn in Challenge A carries over. The Latin is the same (but faster), the writing curriculum is the same (but the books they write about are different), the math presentations are done using the same methods. The research is similar–but instead of anatomy and animals, we are focused on astronomers right now and will move on to chemistry later. But there are new things. LOGIC! And current events! And the biggest NEW THING is that our Challenge A homework schedule is just NOT WORKING for Challenge B.
Practicing Latin vocabulary with alphabet pretzels in Challenge B at Classical Conversations!
We love our local zoo. And we aren’t the only ones who love it–it is regularly named to lists of the best zoos in the country. Living close enough to squeeze in zoo days a couple times per week all summer long sure is a blessing! We get our money’s worth out of our membership, that’s for sure.
As a Classical Conversations family, is Challenge A on the horizon for your family? Last year, we were facing the transition to Challenge after two years of Foundations and Essentials. I was also facing the transition to being the Challenge A director after being the Foundations/Essentials director AND the Essentials tutor. It was a huge change and there are many things I wish I had known a year ago to help me get started.
Over the past year, I completely fell in love with the Challenge program. It offers so much to the students and the parents. Sometimes I think I am learning more than my students. But I don’t think I was adequately prepared for it at the beginning, so here’s my advice for the next few months as you prepare yourself and your student for an amazing year in Challenge A!
There’s so many books on Niagara Falls–here are a few of our favorites!
In July, we are headed to Canada for the week to experience Niagara Falls. We are “camping” (translation: staying in a nice cabin with air conditioning and a bathroom) and plan to do many of the super touristy attractions around the falls.
One of the best ways to prepare for any trip is to read anything and everything you can about the location. I’m the queen of travel books–I have read just about every Disney travel guide ever written and if I’m completely honest, I read the revised versions every year, too. Continue reading “Our Niagara Falls Reading List”
