Monday, September 16, 2013

CC Memory Work Review Workbook

Alternate title: how I invested a bunch of time this summer and am thanking myself every day now! I know a number of you who read here are part of a CC Community but if you're not, feel free to skip the rest of this post :)

First, the background. Here are some things I've learned about myself as a home schooling mama:
- if something is not simplified, I'm skipping it.
- I will not lug some activity book to our printer/copier every day to photocopy pages for each of my students day after day - we'll just skip them.
- looking 25 different places for different sources and resources is unrealistic for me - I'll just skip it.

Are you sensing a theme here? Ahem. One of the many reasons I love CC is that it simplifies our school at home. All three doing the same history, geography, science, etc? Yes, please!

With that said, my children love all the fun stuff. Hmmm, wonder where they got that from?! But, the fun stuff seems to be what adds complications to our days. Like looking through a bunch of sources, making copies, running out of time, and on and on.

Ok, now - this summer I was at my friends house who also does CC and I am always inspired by her organization and ideas {thanks, K!} and this year was no different. She showed me a spiral bound book or two that she'd printed out of one volume Story of the World activity sheets. Printed once and spiral bound. Revolutionary.

I knew I wanted to take this idea and adapt it to serve us and this is what came out of that. I scoured Story of the World activity books, CC Connected, Half a Hundred Acre Wood links, Map Trek and more. Then, I printed out pages I wanted to use to reinforce memory work each week for the whole year and had them spiral bound at Staples.

Now, I feel like I need to say this - I was very hesitant to try this and even more to share it. Doing this kind of workbook is not following the Classical Model of educating. But with that said, it has really helped us to be able to do some more "fun" things and even to practice our memory work during the week in a new and more successful to us way. As always, I would not encourage you to use this in place of the CC Curriculum - but if you own the Foundations Guide and are in a CC Community - this might be a help.

My second hesitation was that I'd be asked to make a copy to share - everyone will need to create their own copy of this sort of book. Too many copyright and ethics laws could be compromised otherwise.

I'm not going to lie - this took a LOT of time. But, the time it is saving me now has been worth every minute I invested in it. I am so thankful for the idea and the time/energy to complete it and for how it is serving us now.

A few logistical thoughts in case you'd like to try this at some point:
- I set up a folder in My Documents and under that folder set up 24 additional folders so I could save files for each week that I came across. This will also allow me to re-create this next time we do Cycle 2 without much searching. I'll be able to tweak and print easily.
- I made a teacher's guide for myself. Just a very simple Word document, nothing fancy with any special notes I needed to remember for a certain activity and page number references. It is just three hole punched and in a three-prong folder.

Comments are still turned off, but if you have questions - feel free to email me at thehomespunheart {at} hotmail {dot} com. If you want to know more about Classical Conversations - visit my posts here, here, here and here.

A bit of photo inspiration of our books: