I just had a conversation with my fourteen year old daughter. She has been in Classical Conversations since she was six years old. She has heard me talk about the phases of learning for nine years now. She has heard me explain that whenever you learn something, you first...
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If you have read The Core: Teaching Your Child the Foundations of Classical Education, you will quickly understand how The Question: Teaching Your Child the Essentials of Classical Education is the follow-up. As Leigh Bortins introduced us to the grammar stage in The Core, she now introduces us to the dialectic stage in The...
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“Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear” (1 Peter 3:15, KJV). How do we, as homeschooling parents, prepare our children to be ready? For some, they are inclined to give...
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At Classical Conversations, we believe that parents are the very best teachers for their children. This is at the core of everything we do. This is why we firmly believe in equipping parents, and why we have parents attend Foundations and Essentials with their students. This is why we...
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A recent article in Forbes magazine claims that poor communication skills are the greatest deficit facing college graduates today. According to a high school presentation teacher: “In this era of email, texting and voice mail, true face-to-face communication is becoming a lost art. While many people are comfortable with private, individual...
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“Don’t touch that! It’s hot.” This Christmas, I spent the holidays with my sister and brother-in-law and my young nephew. My nephew is just learning to stand upright and lunge from surface to surface like a trapeze artist. While I was there, he attempted to place his hand on the...
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A couple of months ago, we talked about translating from English to Latin. This month, we are going to discuss translating Latin to English. This is predominately what you will be doing in Latin in the later years when you study Vergil and Caesar. The premise is similar: ...
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Chapter Two – How Dialectic Teaches Family to Wrestle I Heart Aristotle by Cara McLauchlan “Imagine the doors of a storehouse of knowledge being thrown open and a wealth of knowledge being available at your child’s ready disposal because you taught him how to ask the essential questions and...
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Even in rhetoric, it all comes down to The Way of Repentance. What is this Way? One might look at it in a number of different lights. Here is one: it is leaving behind the voices, anxieties, and vainglories that crowd our minds and souls in order to enter...
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It has been a cold December day and I am sitting inside wishing for a fire to warm my hands. A pot of chicken broth is bubbling on the stove. Tonight, as I chopped vegetables and threw handfuls of herbs into the pot, I thought about the flavorful liquid...
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There is a story often told. It is a timeless story about the courtship between a good man and a gentle young woman. They marry. A family comes into being, into which a child is born. This is a story so often repeated in real time that its occurrences...
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Hwa is thet mei thet hors wettrien the him-self nule drinken Written in an older form of English, the above apparently means something like, “Who can give water to the horse that will not drink of its own accord?” Perhaps the oldest English proverb still in use today,...
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