About the Classical Conversations Essentials Program

In a previous post, I wrote about Classical Conversations. Now, I want to go more in-depth into the Essentials program. 

 

What is it? 

Essentials (officially Essentials of the English Language) is designed for 4th-6th graders. In the morning, the Essentials students will participate in the Foundations program. After lunch and recess, these students stick around for Essentials. Essentials consists of 3 sections: Grammar, Math, and Writing.  

Grammar 

The grammar portion of Essentials uses CC’s own program. Students learn to apply the grammar basics, such as the parts of speech, sentence patterns, types of sentences, etc., that they memorized in Foundations. They will label sentences using question confirmation and then diagram the sentences. Over the course of the year, the concepts get more complex. For instance, at the beginning of the year, students start by labeling a subject-intransitive verb sentence. As part of this, they use question confirmation to identify the subject and verb. Then, they will diagram the sentence. As the year continues, students move on to more challenging sentences. This portion of the afternoon is usually about 45 minutes. 

 

Math 

Math is less structured than grammar or writing. In this part, students usually reinforce their math skills by playing math games. A popular game is Number Knockout in which students have a board with the numbers 1-36. Then they roll three dice. The numbers on the dice are the numbers the students must use to create equations that equal one of the numbers on the board. For instance, if I rolled a 1, 2, and 3, I could say “1 plus 2 plus 3 is 6” and then knock out the number 6 on my board. The main goal of math is for students to be very comfortable with quick math facts. This portion of the afternoon is usually about 30 minutes. 

 

Writing 

For the writing portion of Essentials, CC uses a history-based writing curriculum that correlates with the time period being studied in Foundations. The curriculum is from the Institute for Excellence in Writing (IEW). IEW teaches students writing skills for a variety of different essays including creative, persuasive, critiques, and narrative. There are also optional reading assignments that go along with each unit. Students write a paper every 1-3 weeks. This portion of the afternoon is usually about 45 minutes. At the end of the year, students write a biographical-type essay on a historical character of their choice. This essay is then typically transformed into an oral presentation. Then students participate in an event called Faces of History where they present (either in first or third person) to an audience of the CC community. Each community does it a bit differently, but for me, we usually presented in first person on the last day of the school year and the audience had to guess who we were. Our characters had to be from the same time period as the cycle we had studied that year.  

 

Essentials is designed for upper grammar level students to learn grammar and writing skills that will aid them for the rest of their lives and make them effective communicators.