My son and I LOVE our literature curriculum.  I go online to my local library website and I place holds on the books on the book list for our history lessons and corresponding literature lessons.  The library calls my cell when the books are in and we swing by to pick them up.  Then we cuddle on the sofa for story time and get whisked away to far off places and learn the history, culture, religions, and myths of ancient times.  After I read to my son he tells me his favorite part of the story in complete sentences and I write it down for him.  Then he draws a wonderful picture about it and when he’s finished he tells me all about his drawing.  He has this book filled with his words and his drawings and it is truly a treasure to us both.

Not only is the book list, and correlation with our history curriculum, top notch, but this program is also FREE!  I downloaded it, printed it at home, and took it to Kinkos to have it bound with a cover.  I’m giddy with this and it’s the favorite part of our day!  Thank you Classical House of Learning(CHOL) for such a great program!  You have blessed our homeschool days!

Classical Education

We classically educate our children as outlined in the book The Well Trained Mind.  “Classical education depends on a three-part process of training the mind. The early years of school are spent in absorbing facts, systematically laying the foundations for advanced study. In the middle grades, students learn to think through arguments. In the high school years, they learn to express themselves. This classical pattern is called the trivium.”  The early years are categorized as the Grammar stage, the middle grades are the Logic stage, and in high school it’s the Rhetoric stage.

With classical education you do a four year cycle following the course of history.  The first year is Ancient times, next the Middle Ages, followed by Early Modern, and ending in Modern times.  So for my son in 1st grade I downloaded the Grammar stage for Ancient history from CHOL.  And for 2nd grade I downloaded the Grammar stage for Middle Ages from CHOL.  Our literature lessons from CHOL correspond with our history lessons from Story of the World.  So if our history lessons are about Ancient China, then our literature lessons are as well.  It really helps my son to absorb and retain the information about the different cultures and events.