Susan Wise Bauer, The Well-Trained Mind, p. 23"...the key to the first stage of [a classical education] is content, content, content. In history, science, literature, and, to a lesser extent, art and music, the child should be accumulating masses of information: stories of people and wars; names of rivers, cities, mountains, and oceans...The young writer should be memorizing the nuts and bolts of language--parts of speech, parts of a sentence, vocabulary roots. The young mathematician should be preparing for higher math by mastering the basic math facts."
CC's Foundations Program provides children, aged pre-K to 6th grade, with content, content, content! It meets once per week for 12 weeks in the fall and 12 weeks in the spring from 9am to 12pm. After class, most parents and children stay for lunch. The kids eat as quickly as they can and then run around and play together while the parents chat. At 1pm, 4th to 6th graders, who are enrolled in the Essentials program, go to that class with their parents while younger siblings continue to play while in the care of child care workers or mom volunteers.
Class time is divided into five 30 minute segments:
- New Memory Work
- Presentations
- Fine Art
- Science
- Review Memory Work Games
The Memory Work is divided into 7 areas:
- History Timeline
- History sentence
- Geography facts
- English grammar facts
- Latin facts
- Science facts
- Math facts
All of CC's curriculum is divided into 3 Cycles.
- Each Cycle lasts one year.
- All communities in the U.S. and abroad are in the same cycle
- You can click this link to view how the curriculum is divided between cycles. Scroll to page 2.
- Your child can start CC in any of the cycles. Mine started in Cycle 3.
- If your child starts CC in 1st grade and continues through 6th grade, she'll have gone through all 3 cycles twice. The second time around, she'll have developed better skills in memorizing and the information "pegs" will be more solid.
All children (pre-K) to 6th grade memorize the same information. The youngest children are just learning to memorize and most will not memorize all the information. What's important is that your child is learning to memorize while you are learning how to help your child memorize facts. What's amazing is watching what even a very young child can memorize! They're sponges and they love to recite facts!
It's the tutor's responsibility to get the memory work into short term memory and to show the parent a variety of methods to accomplish this. It's the parent's responsibility to go over the memory work throughout the week to get it into long term memory.
The children enjoy a positive class environment with other kids of similar age. They laugh, sing, do artwork or music theory, science projects, and practice public speaking each week. Class sizes are limited to 8 students and communities are limited to 6 - 8 classes. Many communities, even in Illinois, have waiting lists. So, if you love what you are learning about CC, consider going to an Information Meeting and Open House and registering soon. It's first come first serve!
Foundations Program by founder, Leigh Bortins
Click on this link to download an mp3 to hear Leigh Bortins explain the Foundations Program
View the Foundations Information Flier
Click on the above link to download a flier which will provide the following:
- Information on the Foundations Program
- Chart showing how the material taught in the Foundations Program is divided into three year-long cycles.
- Community Day schedule
Foundations Program FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
Click on the link above to find answers to the following FAQs:
- When you say "Classical" education what do you mean?
- What does a Foundations Tutor cover during the weekly, community class time?
- What is the difference between Foundations Communities and local homeschool support groups?
- What at home history references do you recommend for families that participate in Foundations/
- How did CC choose the order of the Veritas History Timeline Cards (this year, CC rolled out it's own Timeline cards and so no longer uses Veritas' cards)
- What at home science references do you recommend for families that participate in Foundations?
- What English Grammar resources would you recommend for parents?
- Why Latin?
- What Latin resources do you recommend?
- What Latin pronunciation do you use?
- What do I, as a parent, need to be doing at home with my Foundations' student?
- Are Classical Conversations' programs in compliance with my state's homeschool laws?
- Do our Foundations Communities employ "master" teachers for subjects like fine arts, science, or...?
- Can you elaborate on the difference between Classical Conversations' approach in learning and the more familiar "master" teacher approach?
- About the one-room school house approach to learning - what is the reason behind emulating that model?
- I still think the best teacher is someone who specializes in that particular subject...
Program Registration form (Returning Families)
Question? Post it in the comments section or e-mail Elisabeth at: eboggs(at)classicalconversations(dot)com.
