About Classical Conversations’ Challenge A Program

After a student ages out of Foundations and Essentials, the next step is Challenge. Challenge is CC’s program for grades 7-12, the dialectic and rhetoric stages. When I was in seventh grade, I participated in Challenge A.  

 

What is Challenge A? 

Challenge A serves to introduce middle school students to the logic stage. It consists of six strands (as do all Challenge programs). These strands are Logic, Reasoning, Research, Debate, Grammar, and Exposition. The theme of Challenge A is Ownership, as it seeks to teach students to take control of their own schoolwork. 

 

Logic 

In every Challenge program, the logic strand is math. Students are free to use their math curriculum of choice, though the community day is based around Saxon Math 8/7 (the level before prealgebra). In community, students will bring a problem they had trouble with during the week and will walk through it in class. Additionally, students play math games, or the challenge director will review concepts with the class.  

 

Reasoning 

The reasoning strand for Challenge A has what is usually referred to in classical education as logic. The first semester students will use CC’s analogy workbook. As well as teaching the basics of analogies and how to analyze them, the workbook focuses on specific figures of speech and how to annotate. Each week there are workbook pages that students use to reinforce analogy skills. There is also a poem that continues throughout the semester that students use to practice annotating. Then in the second semester, students use the book Fallacy Detective to learn about informal fallacies and how to spot them.  

 

Research 

Research is the science strand of Challenge A. The focus for seventh grade is life science. In the first semester, students research rocks, plants, and different groups of animals, and write papers and presentations about them each week. Then, toward the end of the first semester, the class will begin working on the science fair, which was the highlight of Challenge A for me. Each student chooses a project and, about midway through the second semester, the community hosts the science fair. When I participated, our judges were various friends of community members who were involved in science fields. After the science fair, students learn to draw different body systems and even get to dissect something of the director’s choosing (we did a pig’s heart).  

 

Debate 

This next strand is called debate, but this title is really more appropriate for the subjects in the higher Challenge levels. In Challenge A, our debate strand was cartography. Using CC’s own book, students learn to draw and label the entire world. Students spend the year memorizing countries and their shapes and capitals. For Australia, Canada, and the United States of America, students also learn the provinces/states and their capitals. Finally, at the end of the year, students will draw the whole world from memory at one time and label each country and capital.  

The final map I drew for Challenge A

Grammar 

In all six Challenge levels, grammar is also known as Latin. In Challenge A, students use the first half of the Henle Latin I book. The Challenge A guide has specific exercises from the book to do each week, and CC makes a workbook that has space for the student to complete each of those exercises. Students learn all five declensions as well as the six indicative active tenses and the imperative. They also focus on positive adjective and adverb forms.  

 

Exposition 

Exposition is the reading and writing strand. In Challenge A, students read a variety of historical Newberry Award winner books, such as Carry On, Mr. Bowditch, The Secret Garden, Amos Fortune, Free Man, and the first two books of the Chronicles of Narnia. Using the Lost Tools of Writing curriculum, students will learn to craft persuasive essays based on their reading. Each week is either making an ANI chart (reasons for and against the thesis, as well as interesting facts), drafting an outline, or writing an essay.  

 

Challenge A seeks to teach students to take ownership of their actions. It also provides a transition from the grammar stage to the logic stage while teaching important skills like labeling human body systems and drawing the world.