Blue Book Review and Planning for after CC

This week the kids are actively preparing for their Blue Book Exams. I use the adverb actively loosely as Calvin has barely done anything for his exam. So we’ll see how this goes…

Blue Book Exams are the final test or exam week of our homeschool program, Classical Conversations.

After this week we will be done with our Classical Conversations community but will still have four more weeks of school to finish out Indiana’s requirement for homeschooling.

As cumbersome as it may seem, those four weeks are some of my favorite because I can pull out my old mom school teacher tricks and take the reins on schooling. I know from our break from CC last year that having to plan every week is too much for me now in this stage of life. And we love CC with how the kids all get to spend time with friends, they have an actual teacher, who is not me, taking the reins on teaching the kids. Then the rest of the week we are preparing for the following CC Community day and reviewing what they have learned.

But these 4 weeks are just a little treat for us. We have been discussing for weeks what we are going to learn during those times. So I decided we would approach this democratically and vote on what we would like to study.

I listed every ding-dong thing I could think of on the chalk board as options. The right side were electives…things to learn about just a bit or touch on maybe once a week. The left column were the “themes of the week” things that we would spend a week learning about, followed by hopefully a field trip to learn more. I wrote down every thing we had discussed or I had seen that they had an interest in.

And then they voted. I could tell they took it very seriously. The fun thing this showed me was what they are interested in right now.

Within the votes I had requests to study World War I, World War II, Architecture, Botany, Geology, Zoology, and Aerospace/Outer Space. So many wonderful ideas!

And while I was planning on only studying four topics I’ve decided to try to study two subjects per week.

My plan right now is:

Week 1:

Zoology and Geology (thinking of surprising the kids with an overnight trip to Fort Wayne to see the zoo one day and the science museum the next)

Week 2:

World War I ( I have no idea where to go on a field trip)

Week 3:

Architecture and Botany (again trying to think of a fun place that we could study both of these in either a day trip or with an overnighter thrown in. Grand Rapids perhaps or Chicago)

Week 4:

World War II and Aerospace/Outer Space (I’m thinking of going to the Kalamazoo Valley Museum and seeing if they have their space mission program up and running).

After these 4 weeks we'll be at memorial day and I am so looking forward to the summer! Bring on summer break!

What are you up to during the next four months before Memorial Day? School plans or life plans I'd love to know what you're working on💖.