Classical Conversations Essentials provides Classical Christian community for home school families with students in grades 3rd-6th. This program, which emphasizes language and writing "grammar" while also incorporating highly-dialectic lessons, is designed to reinforce language arts and structure, writing, and arithmetic mastery.
The Essentials Program meets once-a-week for twelve weeks in the fall and twelve weeks in the winter/spring. Students meet in the afternoons after the Foundations program. A trained tutor helps strengthen the "essential" subjects of language arts and structure, writing, and arithmetic.
The language arts and structure portion employs Classical Conversations own The Essentials of the English Language (EEL) Guide which includes lessons that provide a mixture of grammar and dialectic learning tools used to establish language structure understanding. The unique EEL approach takes students beyond "the worksheet" and the ubiquitous fill-in-the-blank method. Upon a firm foundation of memorized vocabulary, rules, and lists, students build strong language skills through the use of a series of analytical tasks. Students are taught how to thoughtfully analyze sentences and language structure, resulting in stronger language skills, which also strengthens students written and oral works.
The writing portion is based on the method of the Institute for Excellence in Writing (IEW) by Andrew Pudewa (video link) utilizing IEW's signature method of structure and style. This method teaches students how to organize their writing through different writing structures, while also providing stylist techniques that make a student's writing more engaging. Students often practice writing skills on the same subjects that are being studied in their current Foundations cycle.
The math portion focuses on reinforcing the "essential" elements of arithmetic through challenging math games and problems. This program is designed to complement your home math program by drilling speed and accuracy with basic operations of arithmetic.
This highly-dialectic program, along with Foundations, is academically charged, and is great preparation for the later Challenge programs.
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