Hi all, I’m new to this forum and really excited to start CM with my children (6 and 3). My 6 year old has been begging for us to join a co-op, and I’ve had a very hard time finding one that is explicitly Charlotte Mason anywhere close to us. There is, however, no shortage of Classical Conversations co-ops around here, and while the philosophy is very different, I feel like there is a great deal of common ground as well. I don’t know enough about Classical Conversations to know: would it work to attend a CC co-op while continuing CM at home, or is there a lot of preparing to do outside of meetings in order to be able to participate in the CC meetings (enough to conflict with using CM at home)?
I’ve done CC and am much more CM than Classical at home. The biggest conflict between the two is that CC has a LOT of rote memorization. They suggest you spend something like 1/2 hour every morning review that week’s facts. I didn’t do that. I did play the CD and let them just listen to the timeline song, but we didn’t do a lot of rote memorization.
The Fine Arts part of CC is very fun (minus that they teach tin whistle in D and don’t care if the teacher actually knows how to play it!) and so are the science projects. We loved that part. And the kids learned from the other parts, we just didn’t do a lot with it at home.
What I did was to do more CM history at home but followed the time period they were learning at CC. So, I’d pick the living books I wanted from those time periods for us to learn from.
CC teaches Latin in a very non CC way (at least for the grammar stage). Again, we just didn’t really do anything with that part.
So, you really can just use a CC class as enrichment and do whatever you want at home. You are the boss in your homeschool! And I did it that way while being one of the tutors at CC.
Thank you MissusLeata! That is exactly the information I was looking for. So not memorizing the CC content as recommended did not hamper participation in the meetings in any way? Thanks again!
I don’t have any experience with this personally, but follow a blogger that participates in CC, with a Charlotte Mason approach. I hope its helpful to you. https://farmhouseschoolhouse.com/
No, not memorizing all the facts doesn’t affect your participation. Some campuses might ask the kids to quote a fact per week to earn something….that depends on the campus. But each week is stand alone and unless you are tutoring, you have no prep work at home.
There is a great conversation about this on a podcast from A Delectable Education (episode 68). I really appreciated the idea of finding friends- both for myself and my children- to spend regular free time with, rather than losing that gift of not keeping track of homework or rushing out for class, or throwing my young children into a learning situation that is structured quite differently from at home, which is confusing to them. Here is the link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-delectable-education-charlotte-mason-podcast/id1043994904?i=1000381334576
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