Camp Hain

008 In-Depth Review of Classical Conversations Homeschool Curriculum

• Tia Hain • Season 1 • Episode 8

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In this episode, Tia Hain from Camp Hain offers an honest and comprehensive review of the Classical Conversations (CC) homeschool curriculum, based on her family's experience over the past four years. She explains the key aspects of CC, including its Christ-centered approach, the classical model of learning, and the emphasis on community. Tia also delves into the different levels and programs of CC, such as Scribblers, Foundations, Essentials, and the Challenge series, and shares personal anecdotes about how her children adapted to and thrived within the CC framework. Additionally, she touches on the new Math Map program and provides insights into how families can get the most out of the CC curriculum. The episode aims to assist homeschoolers and those considering homeschooling in making an informed decision about using Classical Conversations.

Classical Conversations - https://classicalconversations.com/

00:00 Introduction to Classical Conversations
00:58 Welcome to Camp Hain
02:00 Christ-Centered Curriculum
02:55 The Classical Model of Learning
05:16 Community in Classical Conversations
07:52 Levels and Programs Overview
17:54 My Boys' Experience with CC
23:32 Math in Classical Conversations
26:43 Conclusion and Upcoming Episodes

008 Classical Conversations Full Honest Review

[00:00:00] Tia: Have you been thinking about possibly using Classical Conversations for your homeschool curriculum, but you really want to know what it is all about? Well, stay tuned for my honest and very in depth review of our experience with Classical Conversations, also known as CC. Now, do you homeschool or have you thought about homeschooling?

[00:00:22] There are so many systems and curriculums to choose from, including piecing different things together yourself. Have you thought about Classical Conversations homeschool system? We have tried many different homeschool curriculums, but we've been involved with Classical Conversations for over three years now.

[00:00:37] In fact, we're in the middle of our fourth year. My older son was in two of the Challenge levels, and he's moved on because we don't have a level for him anymore right now. My younger son is in the middle of Challenge A. Now, in this episode, I'm going to give you my honest thoughts on Classical Conversations, as well as tell you what the different terms I just spouted off all mean.

[00:00:58] But [00:01:00] first, welcome to Camp Hain, the adventures of a Catholic family that homeschools, public schools, online schools, and has one super obsessed with baseball Kid. Currently, I, Tia Hain, am a Classical Conversations Challenge A Director, so a lot of this podcast channel is related to that for now, but I also post videos about math on YouTube, mostly algebra because I tutor, and I also post about our life.

[00:01:25] I have a new episode up every Thursday. We love our adventures so come along for the ride and click the subscribe button if you are a homeschooler, or thinking about homeschooling, or even if this content just interests you. And if you are on YouTube, give the video a like to help with the algorithm.

[00:01:40] There. I've said the things. Let's move on into the content. So, like I said at the beginning, this is a super in depth review of Classical Conversations. It's long, but it should be everything, I hope. I racked my brain. And you can look at the timestamps in the description to jump to the spot you want if you already [00:02:00] know some of this.

[00:02:00] Okay, number one, it is a Christ centered curriculum. So let's get this out of the way at the beginning. Classical Conversations is a Christ centered homeschool curriculum. You do not have to be an active Christian to participate. They do ask though that you don't disparage Christianity while you're there.

[00:02:19] We were not active Christians when we joined. We have since found a church where we feel at home, but it wasn't that way at the beginning and we felt totally comfortable. If you want to become a director or a tutor, then you do need to be active in a church because you need to have your pastor sign off on your statement of faith.

[00:02:37] But let me reiterate, when we first joined, we weren't active. We were seeking, actively seeking, but we were not active Christians. We were not in a church, but we felt totally comfortable. Everybody made us feel comfortable where we were.

[00:02:53] Number two. They use the classical model of learning and teaching, and I am going to do my best [00:03:00] to describe what that is and how CC uses it, or Classical Conversations.

[00:03:05] We are now on to Classical Conversations use of the classical model. The point of the classical model is not what to learn, but how to learn.

[00:03:16] The three phases of the classical model are grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. All right, let's go into grammar. So grammar means the language of the subject. Kind of obvious, but people don't actually understand because they think I'm actually talking about the grammar that we learned in public school. But the actual definition of grammar just means the language of the subject, such as if you were to study music, you would learn what a treble clef is, what a bass clef is, a staff, what notes are, what rests are, what forte means, what pianissimo means, how to move your fingers to get an instrument to play special notes, et cetera.

[00:03:56] That's the grammar that you would have to learn. You would learn [00:04:00] what they mean, how they work, how they relate to each other and to other subjects. Another part of classical education is seeing the world as a whole place with subjects relating and interacting with one another instead of just stand alone like our modern school system.

[00:04:17] Now we're on to the dialectic phase. The dialectic phase would come next after you understand the grammar phase. 

[00:04:24] You would then learn to use the language of the subject that you have just learned. Hopefully that makes sense. Back to our musical example. You expand on what you have learned about clefs, notes, etc. Then you use that to read music and start playing notes of the musical instrument. That's the dialectic phase.

[00:04:45] And after you've mastered that, you move on to the rhetoric phase. Okay, you don't actually master it. We're constantly learning it, but you get what I mean. Next, we move on to the rhetoric phase. The rhetoric phase would be where you use the language you are starting to understand to [00:05:00] persuade others.

[00:05:01] Back to the music example, this is where you would play music on your instrument, hold recitals and concerts, and eventually become a rock star, or at least become the cool guy or gal playing the guitar around the campfire. 

[00:05:14] So that's the classical model. 

[00:05:16] Now, number three, Community. Classical Conversations is based around community.

[00:05:23] If you're interested in CC, the first thing they will do is connect you with a local community. Your community meets once a week to connect, go over things you will be working on for the upcoming week, or if your child is in a Challenge group, it will be having conversations about what you have learned the previous week.

[00:05:42] I will dive more into the different levels in a bit. Community Day is a great way to keep you from falling behind, to make great connections and friends with like minded families. 

[00:05:53] Let's talk about community.

[00:05:55] Community is very important. And [00:06:00] it's one of the things that makes Classical Conversations work. At least for me, I really enjoyed it. Like I said, we had tried several homeschool curriculums before and they worked great. They had their bits and pieces that worked great, but the community that we have found, the friends that we have made, the friends that my husband and I have made, the friends that our kids have made, it has just been such a joy.

[00:06:23] We really look forward to our community day. Now you want to find the right community for you. Like I said, ours is great. We have mom's night out, once a month we get together at someone's house and we just have lovely conversations. We try not to talk about what's going on at school or with our kids, like maybe talk about something else.

[00:06:44] I have heard some not so great things about other communities, but I, I can't speak to that. Like I said, our community is wonderful and I really never had an issue with our community. If you are in a more densely populated area, Classical [00:07:00] Conversations is becoming so popular that you could probably find another community to join if the one you are in isn't working out for you.

[00:07:09] In fact, we are in a pretty small town. Like, our town is a population of about 15, 000 and it is becoming so popular here that we are thinking of even opening up a second community and we have a couple others that aren't that far away like less than an hour drive and if you're only going one day a week for community day then that's really not that much since it's only one day a week.

[00:07:34] It's not a co op though. When we get together and you'll understand this as I explain the different levels of the program, we're not getting together different people teach different things or it's not really considered a co op in that terms. It is actually a community. 

[00:07:52] Now we're on to the levels or programs. There are several different levels depending on your child's age. The [00:08:00] very first one, which I cannot speak to at all because when we joined my children are already older than this. I'm going to read what they have on the website. The first one is called Scribblers.

[00:08:10] It is for four to eight year olds. Like I said, we haven't used this program, but from the website it says Classical Conversations provides parents of elementary age students like you. With exciting at home teaching activities, like easy to follow tutorials, all aimed at learning through play.

[00:08:27] Through these simple homeschool resources, you can spark their curiosity, engage their developing minds, and equip them with the skills they need to succeed. 

[00:08:38] The next level after Scribblers is called Foundations, which is four years old and older. This is what we started with with my youngest.

[00:08:47] My boys were 9 and 13 when we started with Classical Conversations. Now, it's in the morning for two and a half hours after opening. It is the grammar phase of the whole program. [00:09:00] This is where they are learning the language of things. They learn by memorizing. So, in Foundations, the morning is broken up into five half hour segments.

[00:09:11] The first segment is called memory work. They use songs to help the kids memorize different parts of history, science, English, geography, math, and Latin. Yes, they come back up when they get older. So, these things that they're memorizing as just songs, they will actually use them when they go up to the Challenge levels.

[00:09:33] In fact, like I said earlier, I am a Challenge A director which is kind of the equivalent of seventh grade if you are going to a public school. And we have used some of the Latin songs that these kids learned in Foundations once we started working with Latin in Challenge A. Now the second segment is a science experiment to learn certain aspects [00:10:00] of physical science and the scientific method.

[00:10:04] They have this cute little song, which of course I can't think of right now. Was it scientific method, scientific method, these are the parts, these are the parts. And then you go through the scientific method. The kids learn even how to do the scientific method before they're actually doing all the science stuff.

[00:10:21] A tutor leads this program. A tutor is leading Foundations for all these kids. I don't think I said that, it might be a little confusing. You have one of, usually it's a mom and she will tutor that Foundations level and they're broken up by age group. She will be leading all these different things.

[00:10:42] The third segment that they have in their day is we have a half hour section that is dedicated to something new each quarter. If you take the whole year and break it up into quarters. You have one for fine arts drawing, one for music, where they learn to play the tin whistle, and [00:11:00] this ends around Christmastime, so that is part of our Christmas program. Another one for great artists where they learn about different artists while participating in the style of the art. And then another one at the very end of the year for composers and orchestra where they learn about the different instruments and about different composers.

[00:11:22] Now the fourth segment for the day for Foundations is presentation. It's kind of like a show and tell. The children learn how to speak in front of a group and how to present well because they will be presenting throughout their school career, throughout their life. This is where they start.

[00:11:39] And then the fifth segment of the day, the last half hour, is for review of all the memory work that they have learned so far in the year. It's usually some type of game or something.

[00:11:50] And that is a foundation's morning. 

[00:11:53] Now for Essentials. Essentials is the program that is for 9 to 12 year olds. It is usually [00:12:00] in the afternoon after lunch for 2 hours. Now, this is what the website says. Essentials is a bridge between the grammar and dialectic arts that prepares students for the middle and high school challenge programs.

[00:12:13] So, this is where the children learn what we think of as grammar from public school. Things like the eight parts of speech, which are noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, conjunction, interjection, preposition, adjective, sentence patterns, diagramming sentences, how to write with structure and style through the Institute for Excellence in Writing.

[00:12:40] We just call it IEW. 

[00:12:41] Currently the math is on your own. They're adding The Math Map in the future. Not sure when. Right now that's only available for Challenge A this year. For next year it will be Challenge A and Challenge B. But they are going to be adding that for math in the future to go into Essentials.

[00:12:59] I [00:13:00] will have a future video on The Math Map. In group, they do math games and drills. to increase the speed of their addition and subtraction and multiplication, division, roots, and exponents in preparation for higher math. That's basically what they do for the two hours in Essentials.

[00:13:19] Next, after that, we have the Challenge Program. It's Challenge A, Challenge B, then Challenge 1, 2, 3, and 4. That equates to, if you want to think of it in public school terms, Challenge A would be 7th grade, Challenge B would be 8th grade, and then Challenges 1, 2, 3, & 4, are freshman, sophomore, junior, senior, and high school.

[00:13:42] You, the parent, are still the teacher. Now in Foundations and Essentials, there is a tutor that goes through the day, but they are there to help you and the student with the information about what you're going to teach your child over the coming week. In the Challenge Group, there is a director. The director is just there to facilitate [00:14:00] conversations among the students about what they have learned and worked on over the previous week.

[00:14:07] So, for Foundations and Essentials, you go to Community Day and the kids learn something, you learn something, and then you go home that week and work on it. But you're still the teacher, you still are the one controlling what your kid is learning and what they're learning at home. The Community Day is just to help you.

[00:14:26] Now, once you're up to challenge levels, the students and you are working on everything all week long, and then when you go to Community Day the director leads conversations about what they've learned. The directors, they're not there to teach it, that you do at home. But at this age, most parents are kind of hands off anyway.

[00:14:45] It really is about how your community works. When I directed a Challenge 1 group a couple of years ago, I had more parents that were hands off and it was more just me with the kids. But this year that I'm directing Challenge [00:15:00] A, I have a lot more parent involvement. 

[00:15:03] Challenge is a lot, but you scale to what you and your student need.

[00:15:07] For example, when I directed the Challenge 1 group, everyone decided to drop at least one of the essays. They assigned a lot of essays and we ended up, pretty much everybody dropped one of them. And right now my oldest is doing a hybrid of public school and online school and home school. His public school English class only uses two books for one semester, two.

[00:15:32] The Challenge 1 class that we were in a couple of years ago, it had six to seven novels per semester, plus a few short stories. And by the way, those two books for his public school English class, one of them was a short story. Literally they read one novel. and one short story, but in challenge they do six to seven novels.

[00:15:56] It just ended up being a lot for my kids and that's what they all end up deciding to [00:16:00] do was just drop one of them. They still had a ton of work. They did five to six essays per semester. That's 10 a year. They got a lot of good work in.

[00:16:09] The next section is the Classical Conversations timeline. And by that, I mean the timeline of how Classical Conversations came to be, or I don't know how you say came to be, like how, how the whole program developed. Now this is again what I've been told, obviously I wasn't there at the very beginning, but what I've been told is that Classical Conversations started out with just the Challenge 1 through 4 programs.

[00:16:38] It was just something for homeschooling high school kids. And then most of the parents really liked it, but they wanted something for their younger kids to prepare them for those Challenge classes of 1, 2, 3, and 4. That's when they came up with Challenge A and B to get the kids ready for that. Well then, as the [00:17:00] parents had their kids in that, they're like, well, we want something to prepare them for Challenge A and B.

[00:17:04] That's where they came up with Essentials. They did the writing program through Essentials and learning proper English grammar, etc. Well, then parents wanted something to prepare their kids for Essentials. And that's when they came up with the idea of Foundations. And I really like that because it starts the kids early and all they're doing is the memory work, but it comes in so handy if they've done that through their younger years.

[00:17:30] And then they go up to the Challenge classes and they have that stuff in their brain. It's just there. It's much easier than trying to teach them all this information without already having had that foundation or that grammar phase. And so, it kind of just shows right there how the classical model really works and really works well.

[00:17:54] All right, now I'm going to talk about my boy's experience. I have two boys. Right now my oldest is [00:18:00] 16 and my youngest is 12. 

[00:18:02] When we started with CC, my older son was 13 and my younger son was 9. This was three and a half years ago now. Did I do the math on that right? I don't know if I did.

[00:18:20] Okay. Yeah, I did. They had just turned nine and 13 and now they're 12 and a half and 16 and a half. Okay. Math is right. Anyway, for my older son, we had already been homeschooling him for a couple of years and he kind of was on the borderline between a Challenge A and a Challenge B. He's an August baby. He's like right on that cusp where he could be the youngest one in Challenge B or he could be oldest one in Challenge A. But they didn't have a Challenge A that year. We put him in Challenge B. He did Challenge B and Challenge 1. Now he was the youngest one and already the kids that they [00:19:00] had in his group were a bit older even for that level.

[00:19:03] They were at that stage where they were still trying to make it work. He was younger by almost over a year. Like they were great kids. Don't get me wrong. They were absolutely wonderful kids. They got along real well, but my older son. He's very much an introvert as it is, putting him with kids that were that much older than him He did well with the work But it would have been better for him to be with younger kids and oddly enough his friend that he had made through baseball, how we got all connected with CC anyway was younger to the point where he was still in Essentials.

[00:19:43] He could have been in a Challenge A, but basically it would have been a Challenge A group with just the two of them. That wasn't going to work, but. He did well with the material, the kids were great and worked well with him, and he did fine with that. But as we [00:20:00] were going from Challenge 1 to Challenge 2, his group, they were starting to disband a little.

[00:20:06] They still had a Challenge 2 class, but it was only 4 kids, and all those kids have either moved on or one of them actually went up a level. He's an older kid. He's pretty smart so when the other ones left, he just went up with the even older kids. Technically there isn't a group for my older son anymore.

[00:20:27] We went ahead and put him in the public school system for just two classes The nice thing about the state that we're in we can do this so we could put him in for just the amount of classes that we want. He also has an online program through the state so he can take online classes and then we also homeschool him part time.

[00:20:45] But the whole point of this long roundabout story was that he actually did really well. He did Challenge B. In Challenge B they do things like mock trial. They do a lot more as far as [00:21:00] reading novels and writing papers on novels. They use a program called Lost Tools of Writing, which I really like. It's very great for persuasive writing. 

[00:21:10] We still did our own math program because that's the way CC works. You do your own math until just this year when they've started adding in that Math Map, but all the other years still do their own math. But they do a science program that he did, which was wonderful.

[00:21:26] They do, they call it debate, but it's also where they put in history. When you go up to Challenge 1 you do actual debate, but it's also where they have the history classes. He did really well with all those programs. But like I said, it just, that particular level just kind of started falling apart for us in our community.

[00:21:45] Oddly enough right now it's going really strong and our Challenge classes as they're moving up, not the one that he would be in, but the ones coming up, they're really strong and I think they're gonna be pretty full coming up. 

[00:21:58] Now my younger son, [00:22:00] he started off in Foundations and Essentials and he did those programs for three years, which I will have more episodes about how those work, what they call cycles and tours, 

[00:22:16] but I don't want to go into that in this episode. This one's already going to be a bit of a long one as it is. I will have an episode coming up really describing how Essentials works. 

[00:22:25] But anyway, it worked out well for him because he could go through all three cycles. He went through all three of them. Basically he kind of got all the information.

[00:22:35] But the nice thing about Essentials is it's designed to be a three year program. You do the same stuff over each year, but you do different topics with it. Like you do the same type of writing, but you do it with different topics. And the nice thing about that is the very first year because you know, you're going to do it for three years, [00:23:00] the very first year, it's like you don't have to be perfect. And I really like that because it feels like a lot, but it's like, Oh, we're going to do this for two more years. We've got three years to get this down. It's going to be great. That was what my boys did.

[00:23:14] For the math my older son was doing the Saxon program. That is the one that they recommended.

[00:23:20] For my younger son. He actually did these workbooks, which of course I can't think of the name of right now. But he really liked the workbooks. They have these little monsters in them and they really explain things well. I really liked what he was doing for math.

[00:23:32] Speaking of math, that is our next topic. The math is up to you. In this year that we did, like I said, CC started a math program called The Math Map. It is in Challenge A this year. That is the only one that has a specific math curriculum. Everything else is up to the parent to find the math that works best for their student.

[00:23:57] Next year, those kids that were in Challenge [00:24:00] A will be moving up to Challenge B and they will be continuing the next year of the Math Map program and the kids going into Challenge A will be doing the one that we're doing right now. Basically, as this group that's in Challenge A right now goes up each level through the Challenge, they will be doing the next level of the Math Map.

[00:24:19] I am not sure when they're introducing the Math Map for the younger kids, but that's what they're doing right now for that.

[00:24:26] I'm probably going to have an episode about the Math Map and how it works coming up . If you are at my YouTube channel, I do have a quick video about how to do the Math Map, but that's all I have on that so far. 

[00:24:39] Now if you are starting when your kids are a bit older, like the 8 to 12 year old range instead of younger, where you would just start with Foundations.

[00:24:49] I'm going to describe a little bit more how that worked since that's how it worked for our younger son.

[00:24:54] Foundations, like I said before it feeds into Essentials But you [00:25:00] can do both at the same time and that's what we did with my younger son because we wanted him to have the grammar phase of a lot of these things that you can get in Foundations and it just made it so he was there for a full day because if we weren't doing Foundations, he would just be there for the two hours in the afternoon every Tuesday and that would be it.

[00:25:19] Adding on the Foundations in the morning part of the those Tuesdays, by the way, I keep saying Tuesdays because that's our community day, but it's not everybody's community day. Different communities pick different days, whatever day they agree upon. When I'm saying Tuesday, I'm referring to our community day.

[00:25:37] For Foundations, he would be there in the morning, then we'd have lunch, and then he would do his two hours in the afternoon. And it really isn't that much extra work to do during the week. For Foundations, as I said before, they're learning these songs, what are called memory work. They're which of course I'm not going to be able to think of them right now, but let's say the declension.

[00:25:57] First declension for Latin [00:26:00] nouns. They would learn a song for the first declension. When they go into Challenge A and start actually learning Latin nouns, they know what the first declension is already. But let's say they learned about that in class that day. in their Foundations, they would just spend the week singing that song that they learned for the first declensions and that's it.

[00:26:21] They would know it when they would do the review for memory work the next community day. It literally took him as a 9, 10, and 11 year old, it took him maybe a half hour to do all his memory work for Foundations each morning. He would just get up, look at his book, do all the songs that he'd learned, and then he'd go into his writing stuff for the Essentials program.

[00:26:43] Hopefully that covered everything about how Classical Conversations works. If you have any questions, you can leave them for me in the comments or you can even contact Classical Conversations. I believe it's just Classical Conversations dot com. You can find them at that website. [00:27:00] I'll put a link in the description. They're very good about answering questions. You could even put on there that you're looking for a certain community and they will hook you up with open houses that they have for their community. Because each community is supposed to have open houses assigned where you can go in and just check it out for a day and see what they do and get to talk to people.

[00:27:24] Upcoming episodes, I have, like I said, I'm going to dive into Essentials more detail. If you really are interested in that program and interested in knowing more about that, look for an episode coming up about that. And then I'm also going to do an episode about what you really need to be working on each year in Essentials.

[00:27:43] If you are already doing Essentials or you're thinking about doing Essentials, it can get kind of overwhelming the first year because you feel like you need to be doing it all. But you don't need to be doing it all. I will be doing an episode based on somebody that went through three years of Essentials, [00:28:00] got extremely overwhelmed the first year, to the point of tears, and then realized like, wait a minute, I'm putting way too much pressure on myself.

[00:28:10] I will have an episode describing exactly what you would need to do. If you're interested in that, plan on listening to that episode coming up. And I believe that is it for today. 

[00:28:20] If you like this episode, give it a thumbs up, please subscribe to the channel, let the algorithm do the work, and I can make more episodes. Until next time.