(upbeat music) - Welcome friends to this episode of the "Everyday Educator" podcast. I'm your host, Lisa Bailey, and I'm excited to spend some time with you today as we encourage one another, learn together, and ponder the delights and challenges that make homeschooling the adventure of a lifetime. Whether you're just considering this homeschooling possibility or deep into the daily delight of family learning, I believe you'll enjoy thinking along with us.

But don't forget, although this online community is awesome, you'll find even closer support in a local CC community. So go to classicalconversations.com and find a community near you today. Well, listeners, I'm excited to welcome you to this episode, and I'm excited to answer a few questions that listeners like you have posed over the last six weeks and ask for some insight or for some, maybe not answers per se, sometimes what people are looking for are another person's experience, or some wisdom gained from the School of Hard Knocks.

And so that's what I'm gonna offer today. I don't pretend to be the absolute expert on parenting, or classical education, or homeschooling, or classical Christian homeschooling, or classical conversations and all its programs. I can share with you the experiences that I have had, that my family has had, the ups and downs, the things that I have learned the easy way and the hard way, some wisdom that I have gleaned from friends and fellow travelers along the path of homeschooling through the years.

I'm glad to share all of those things with you. I want you to know that for most of the questions that are posed, there's not one right answer. And I know that somehow discouraging to some people to think that there's more than one possible route to a good outcome, but that's the truth.

As we move through life, we have all experienced the fact that while we might want there to be one perfect answer that we could research and find and rest in, many times there are a range of answers that are true, or that are applicable, or that fit our situation at any given time.

So I don't want you to be discouraged when I say that this is Ask Lisa, and I am going to answer your questions, but my caveat is that it's not the only answer, and it may not be the best answer for your family. I want to tell you a little bit about myself for those of you who are new listeners, or maybe those of you who are old listeners, but never knew my whole story.

I got involved with Classical Conversations, believe it or not, 20 years ago. When my girls were little, in foundations, we discovered, we found Classical Conversations through some friends who had stumbled on to this amazing community of like-minded families who were pursuing the kind of education that I had been trying to create at home for my two little girls.

We actually heard about CC a year or so before we were able to join. My husband is a pastor, and at that point, we were brand new church planters. And so our desire was strong, and I had lots of time, but we didn't have a lot of financial resources.

So the first year, we watched our friends become involved in this community that really looked amazing, but that we felt like we just couldn't afford financially. It was not God's timing for us. So we continued to do what we had done, which I discovered was very classical. But then we were able to join a Classical Conversations community when I accepted the call to be a tutor myself.

So that was our open door into CC, and my girls both entered the foundations program, and we loved it. They took to it, like fish take to water. All that memorization was so much fun to them. And having, my daughter said, "It's the best of both worlds, Mama. We are homeschooled, but we have a class.

We have friends." They had friends to be with one day a week. And I had friends to be with one day a week. And I had other students to pour into and love on. And my girls had other adults who were pouring into them and loving on them. And so we loved our foundations years, and we stayed with the program.

My girls both graduated from Challenge Four, and I was a tutor of various levels and have held lots of positions within Classical Conversations way back when we had state managers. There was a state manager for every state, and I was blessed to serve as the state manager of North Carolina.

And I loved that. I loved seeing communities all across our state grow. What I really loved, though, was encouraging parents that they had what it takes to homeschool their children, that if God had given them the call, that God would equip them to do it. And so I loved pouring encouragement into families, moms and dads and students.

And so in my next CC job, I got to do that sort of full-time. I became the practicum guru for all intents and purposes for about seven or eight years for Classical Conversations, designing our summer practicum program and the training that went into equipping facilitators and speakers to lead those great conversations for families as we all grew in our understanding of the classical model.

And so the whole idea of being able to inspire, encourage and equip families really became my passion. And so my responsibility with CC has continued to grow and change and evolve as Classical Conversations has continued to grow and change and evolve. And I now serve as the Director of Program Development with CCMM, so with Classical Conversations Multimedia.

And I have been utterly blessed to be the podcast host of The Everyday Educator for more years than I can remember. So I love podcasting because it gives me a chance to keep speaking to families, to keep speaking to parents who have questions about, "Can I do this?" or "How should I do this?" or "Now I have this problem," or "What about this resource?" And so I have absolutely loved spending time with you guys every week for the past eight or 10 years, talking about what makes our heart beat, our kids and our education of our kids and growing as lead learners in our homes and developing family rhythms of learning.

One of the projects that I have been able to spend a lot of time on in the last four or five years was Scribblers, the Scribblers resource. I was one of the principal writers of Scribblers. And so we're gonna talk about some of those verbs, some of what we call the Scribblers verbs that will help us to assess are we doing enough and has it been a good day?

Because y'all, sometimes you get to the end of the day and you think, "Really, what did I accomplish?" Yes, everybody's dressed mostly and nobody's bleeding, but did we really do enough to say we had school today? We're gonna talk about that. We are gonna talk about that. I have about seven questions that people sent in over the last six weeks that we will address.

And hopefully we will do another episode of Ask Lisa sometime soon. But I also hope to do a round table discussion of moms and fellow homeschoolers, dads, fellow homeschoolers that will represent all of the stages of our family. So there'll be a voice that represents where you are in your homeschool journey, not just a voice that represents where you will be in five or 10 years or where you were three or four years ago.

So keep listening. You guys are an awesome community that is an encouragement to me. It encourages me to know that there are moms and dads who are still super eager to be the lead learners and the best educators of their children at home. So anyway, let's jump in. The very first question that I have came from a mom who has kids two years old, seven years old, and 10 years old.

Okay, let's pause for a moment. Man, those are busy years. Those are busy, intense years. So mama, let me just say right now, you are doing a noble task. Give yourself some credit for taking up the challenge of homeschooling and potty training and manners training and preteen years. You're doing it for years all at once.

The Lord is here for you and your community is here for you. Her question, her comment is, "The hardest thing about homeschooling is consistency." She said, "Nothing," well, and she says, "Nothing is consistent except community day." So let's take a step back. Everybody take a step back. If you're worried or anxious about something, I know I do this, I tend to speak in a hyperbole.

So she says, "Nothing is consistent except for community day." Mom, I want you to give yourself some credit. I bet there are other consistencies in your family's life. And it's easy to see all the ways that we don't quote unquote measure up. And all the things that we feel like are lacking in our parenting or our schooling or the way we structure our days with our students, with our children.

But give yourself some credit. She said, "I want to know what to do." So here's the question, should I structure my days? Should my days have lots of structure? Should my days have less structure? Maybe I have so much structure built into my day that there's no way that my family is gonna follow that schedule.

If you have every 15 minutes or even every 30 minutes of your day planned out, I's dotted, T's crossed, that's gonna be tough with a two-year-old, right? That's gonna be tough with a seven-year-old. It may be tough with a 10-year-old depending on the personalities and needs of your specific children.

And here's the truth, the personality and needs of you yourself. And maybe you are not one who does well with same old, same old. Maybe routine is just your fast track to I'm over it or I'm bored or I feel trapped. Maybe one of your children needs to mix it up.

Maybe what you need is a rhythm instead of a schedule. The first thing I think that you probably need to do is take an honest look at your family's biological rhythms. Are you early risers or late risers? What is your spouse's work schedule like? Do they work nights? Do they work second shift?

Do they work a typical Monday through Friday during the day? Does your family travel a lot? Do you have older family members who live with you who require care or a different schedule from your children and you? Those are some things to think about. I think that most children do well when they know what to expect.

That's not the same thing as having every 15 minute, every 30 minute hard block schedule. But when children know what to expect, when I get up in the morning, we always, and this is just as a for instance, when I get up in the morning, I always snuggle in bed with my mom.

I always read a book and then get up and get dressed and make my bed and have breakfast. Always after breakfast, and see there are no times associated with this, okay? After breakfast, we always clear the table and snug up on the couch and we read our Bible and we read a story and we say our Bible verse, you know?

After our read aloud time, we do math together. And maybe that is you play math games. Maybe that is you use pattern blocks. Maybe you use, you go through the math map booklet with your two older children while your little one plays with blocks or shape sorters beside of you.

Maybe after math time, we always go outside or maybe every Tuesday after math, we go to the library. We have lunch and after lunch, I work on memory work or if you have an older child, I work with my mom on essentials or I have reading time. If your child, if you and your child know the rhythm, then everybody knows what to expect.

It's not so rigid as in every 15 minute, every 30 minute schedule, but it gives you enough structure that you can fit all the big pieces that are important to your family in and everybody knows what to expect. In Scribblers, we offer the idea of arranging your day around the Scribblers verbs.

For families with young children, what you want to be sure that you do is be together every day, piquing their curiosity, chasing down wonder, reading and talking as a family. And if you can get to the end of the day, we say, and you have prayed together, played together, read together, explored together and served together, it has been a good day.

And so you could arrange the rhythm of your day around the Scribblers verbs. Every day, you need to pray together. You need to have a devotion, a spiritual time. Maybe you will sing a hymn. Maybe you will memorize scripture verses together. You need to pray together. You need to play together.

Play is the work of childhood. That is actually how children learn best while they are having fun, while they are doing something. And most children like to be active when they play. So play blocks with your children. But as you build, maybe you are creating patterns. Maybe you are naming squares and circles and rectangles and triangles.

And maybe you'll discover that when you put two triangles together, you can make a square. Or when you put a bunch of triangles together, you can make a different shape. So you play together, read together every day, read all kinds of things together. That will allow your children to see the beauty of words in stories and short books and poems and song lyrics, all kinds of reading.

Read together every day and help your little children begin to learn how to read so that they can read by themselves as well. So read together every day. Explore together every day. You might explore a topic that you've read about. You might explore your backyard. You might explore what different baking ingredients do when you cook in the kitchen.

You might explore a science museum in your town. You might explore the heavens at night as you look at the stars. Let your child be the guide. Let the foundation's memory work be the guide. Explore more deeply some of the people or places or organisms that you encounter in the memory work, but explore something every day and then serve together every day.

Most of us have chosen to homeschool our children because we want to raise them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. We want them to have hearts full of mercy and love and kindness. And one of the best ways to teach our children to be good citizens of the world and good citizens of heaven is to teach them to be kind to one another and to serve one another.

And it begins at home. So even your two-year-old can serve his or her brothers and sisters. And as your children get older, you go farther outside of your home to serve your neighborhood and your church family and your extended family in your town and maybe your state. And I know lots of families who as their children approach the teenage years, do family mission trips together, even overseas.

So you could have the rhythm of your day based around the Scribbler's Verbs. Think about the first thing to do is to think about what it is that you are trying to do with your homeschool. What are you trying to teach your children? What is important to you as a family?

And then everything you do should serve that purpose. I think that probably consistency has a different definition for all of us, but I suspect, Mom, that what you're looking for is something that you and your children can come to rely on, something that is reassuring in its rhythm. So decide what are the important aspects of homeschooling for you every year, every month, every week, and then work back into the everyday.

And maybe the way to consistency for you is not a schedule, but a rhythm. All right. Next question. This was an interesting question to me. How many CC families supplement language arts and math in the Foundations years? Well, I can remember when I began as a practicum speaker almost 20 years ago.

I remember telling people, Foundations is wonderfully amazing. It is so illuminating. You and your children are gonna explore the world through the Foundations memory work. It is absolutely mind-boggling the amount of stuff that you're gonna know. But you still need, in addition to the Foundations memory work, a language arts or a learn-to-read program and a practice math computation program.

And people will say, "What's the best one? "What's the best one for my family?" That, my friends, I can not answer for you because the answer for both of those is the one that you and your family will do regularly, that you will hold onto. Because both learning to read and learning to be fast with your math facts is dependent on everyday practice.

So you need a reading program, moms and dads, that you can handle, that you can figure out, that you can and will happily use, and that fits the learning style of your child. And you need a math program that won't prompt everybody to tears or mutiny because to become proficient in mathematics, in arithmetic especially, what you need is everyday practice and familiarity.

You need to get super over-familiar with some of the math facts and with how to add and subtract and multiply and divide and recognize shapes and time and money and that kind of thing. So from my experience, every CC family supplements the language arts and the math curriculum in the foundations years.

There are lots of programs out there. I will tell you that a phonics-based reading curriculum has been proven to be the best for students who are learning to read. That is a very classical way to read. And if you get a hold of the Scribblers curriculum, which is designed for students that are three to eight years old, there is an entire section with phonics games and activities and learning to read activities.

So it's very important that you and your beginning readers have a learning to read program. There is of course more to reading than just learning to decode sounds and letters. You want to teach your children to read for pleasure and to read for information. So reading comprehension is also something that you want to practice.

Most of the reading programs that you will find will help you, will encourage you in that desire. But I will tell you also that just reading aloud as a family will fan the flames of reading comprehension and interest in the written word. So far as math goes, you really, really need to find a math program that you guys will do fairly happily, very routinely.

The Math Map is awesome. You can look on CC Connected and get examples from the Math Map, Young Ages. This is a very classical curriculum where children become familiar with shapes and vocabulary and content before they are asked to manipulate numbers and concepts. It is very classical, it's very different.

It is very conversation-based. And for me, the best teaching that you will do with your little children involves you as the mentor and them as the learner. And believe me, as they get older, sometimes those roles flip and they become the mentor and you become the learner as they move through middle and high school.

But classical learning is all about the give and take. It is all about a conversation and exploring together. So find a reading program and find a mathematic and arithmetic program that you and your children will enjoy together. All right, next question. This question is very interesting to me. This is a challenge family, a family who said, what do you do, how do you handle challenge discussions with families that are uncomfortable with parts of history?

Now, I really wish that I had the questioner here so I could ask some clarifying questions. I'm wondering, are these discussions at home or in community? I am suspecting that we're talking about conversations and discussions within the Challenge Day community for families that are uncomfortable with parts of history.

Now, I'm not sure, I'm making assumptions again on which parts of history the family might be uncomfortable with. But here's what I would have, here's what I have to say in a general way. These are challenge discussions and the most, the absolute most beautiful part of the challenge program for my family was that my girls learned how to explore ideas and different positions on issues respectfully, thoughtfully, offering mercy and grace to their classmates who had different perspectives.

They learned how to listen twice as long as they spoke. They learned how to keep asking clarifying questions till they got to the kernel of difference when they were discussing, when they were coming at an issue and arriving at two different conclusions. Challenge communities are beautiful places where our students are taught to love their neighbor well by listening and trying to understand.

There are very few issues that are off limits for discussion but every opinion that is voiced is worth examining and discovering truth. And so I think that the first thing, if my family was uncomfortable with a way that a piece of history was being presented in class, I think that I would talk to the director and make sure I would talk to my student first and say, are all sides of the issue being brought forward?

Are all sides being presented? And if my student said, well, no, everybody seems to think this one way and it's not my way, but that's the only position that is being brought forward, then I would have to say to my student, let's pray and think, let's pray through this and let me help you figure out ways to bring the other position, the opposing position or a different viewpoint, or at the very least, some clarifying questions that could be put forward to help us all look at an issue in the broader sense.

Realizing that there might be another side to this issue or that these events might have had, it might look different from somebody else's perspective or from the other side. So I think I would talk to my student and I would also talk to the director. I would want to know what is it that's bringing the discomfort?

Is it that one side is being ignored or is it that one person or one group's position is being shunned or belittled? That's hard for me to imagine, but that should not happen in the challenge communities. I think exploring and sharing and researching and thinking. The beauty of classical conversations is that our students are taught to examine an issue from all sides and in its totality, even things that are uncomfortable.

Here's the truth. The Lord does not want us to be ignorant and God is big enough for all of our questions. As long as we are looking for God to show us, to give us light and illumination, I think that there is very little that our challenge students can't explore together.

I think that CC wants our students to examine all sides of all issues so that our students have practice thinking well, reasoning their way to truth, not just appropriating what their family has always believed or what the loudest voice in a group is saying or the most persuasive person.

There needs to be room for all questions to be searched out and researched and thought about and weighed and logically examined. And there is respect for all earnest seekers within our classical conversations communities. So bottom line, first line is to talk to your student. Is it uncomfortable because you're ignored or because you don't know how to bring up your disagreement?

And then talk to the director. How can we foster a true questioning, weighing, looking at all the options atmosphere for our students? All right, somebody wrote in and said, okay, how do I deal with this? CC looks absolutely amazing, but it's so unfamiliar. How do I take the leap in faith?

You know what? That is a question that everybody has, that everybody has had. We've all gone to an information meeting or almost all of us have gone to an information meeting or we've listened to a friend wax eloquent about how great CC is and it does sound great and it looks amazing on paper.

And if you ever go to a practicum and listen to a panel of challenge students, you just think, I don't know what Kool-Aid they have been drinking, but I would like to buy some and give it to my children every day for the rest of their lives. I want my children to be able to speak well and think well and answer well and enjoy learning and enjoy talking to people about what they're learning.

So yes, it does sound amazing. How do you screw your courage up to do it? You just have to leap. You just have to try it. Here's, I wanna go back to one thing that I said earlier. The first thing to me, when you are trying to decide what to do with these awesome, beautiful humans that the Lord has given you, your children, you have to prayerfully consider what is it that we as a family believe about the Lord?

What is it that we believe about our children individually? What do we believe is God's mission for our family? What do we believe about the position of education as it impacts our family and our family's mission? You have to know those things in order to start well. Because sometimes once you get started, things are gonna be hard.

And if you don't know why you started, and if you're not sure that this was a good, right path that the Lord had led you to, you're gonna be tempted to quit. Not just quit classical conversations or classical education. You're gonna be tempted to quit whatever you start, whatever kind of homeschooling you start, or even homeschooling because it is going to get hard.

And on hard days, you need more to fall back on than I thought this was gonna be fun, or I thought this was gonna be easy, or I thought this would be more convenient than sending them to school. You will find 50 ways to second guess yourself on that the first month that you're homeschooling.

All of that stuff. But if you believe that God gave you your children and He is calling you to raise them and educate them at home so that you can make sure that your child knows the Lord deeply, and that He sees this world that the Lord created and understands how beautiful and good it is, and how intricately it fits together, and how the Lord is calling them to be a steward of His Word and a steward of His world, if you are convinced that this classical education is the way God's calling you to raise your children, then even when the day gets hard or long or discouraging or frustrating, you'll keep going because you will know that you are marching toward the goal that God called you to.

It is amazing. CC is amazing. And it is, for most of us, it was very unfamiliar when we started. The whole idea of memorizing so much material when they're young is not something that most of us grew up doing. I will tell you from experience, it is a blessing beyond all reason.

My children memorized and memorized and memorized, but then as they got older, they had so much good stuff to think about and to put together in ways that helped them understand the world that God had created and that He was calling them to participate in. All of the emphasis on public speaking is very off-putting to some of us who never had to do that when we were little or older and don't like to do it now.

And we've got four and five-year-olds who stand up and give a presentation every week. Listen, it is a blessing beyond compare to raise a child who knows how to think, who knows how to organize their thoughts so that they can communicate persuasively and in an interesting and natural way with somebody else on almost any topic that you hand them.

It is a beautiful equipping thing. One thing I would ask for you, and when you're trying to decide, this is so new and it's so different. Can I even do this? Think about for yourself, how do you approach most new things? How do you get used to the new thing?

Do you need a buddy to walk arm in arm with you and pull you forward or push you from behind when the going gets rough or just be there to experience it with you? That's what community is all about. Join a classical conversations community. You will have a room full of buddies who are walking the same path and sometimes stumbling over the same ruts, but sometimes leaping over the same hedges that you are.

Homeschooling with a friend is so much better than going it alone, no matter what method of homeschooling you take. Community is a blessing. Find a community and dive in, but make the commitment that you're going to stick with it. You need to stick with it long enough to begin to see the fruit.

It might be very different from what your children are used to doing too. And some kids love it right away and some kids are a little slower to warm up because it is so different. But every child loves time with his family. Every child loves time with his parent.

And if you will pour into your child and use the classical conversations curriculum as a springboard to deeper conversations, not only will your child grow, but your family relationships will grow as well. All right. This is an interesting question from a challenge mom. She said, "My teenagers always finish their work early.

How can I fill their time? What do I need to add to fill their time?" Now, I have to tell you the truth. This flabbergasted me when I read it. My kids did not always finish early. It didn't take them forever in a hundred years, but they were not early finishers necessarily of the challenge material.

Here are a couple of things that I have to suggest. In the challenge guides, there's a range of work. They're the things that you are expected to do every week so that you are prepared to participate in class discussions. And then there are extra, there's like the extra mile you could go.

There are, for instance, in American documents, there are documents that you're supposed to annotate each week so that you can have a true discussion with your classmates when you come to class. Everybody's read the same thing. Everybody's kind of chewed it up and digested it. We've got something to talk about.

But there are always additional documents that you can work on with your student at home if your student is finishing earlier. Things that will help them see maybe even more of the fabric of the founding fathers and the founding American documents. So there's usually more that you can do.

You can encourage your teenager to review. I know no teenager that I know likes to review, but just like intensity, duration over time is what brings mastery in memorization. It's what brings mastery and understanding of more complicated concepts as well. So help your kids to not despise going back to review and seeing if they can find new connections between what they talked about and read about and studied last week and what they're learning this week.

Another thing that your older teenagers or teenagers and older students can do is help their younger brothers and sisters and help review foundations with the younger kids. One of the coolest things that I have noted is that when I had my older daughter review with my younger daughter, I would sometimes overhear her say, oh, be sure you've got this.

Be sure you do that Latin memory work. Man, you're gonna have a much easier time with Latin if you get these endings down now. Or they will be reviewing history sentences and say, oh my gosh, you're gonna learn more about this. Let me show it to you on this map.

Look how close this country is to this country. Here's how they're related. And they begin to share and they begin to become rhetorical with some of the information that they themselves have studied. That's a lot of fun too. You may, your student may be ready to consider CC+ that what we used to call dual enrollment is concurrent enrollment.

They may be able with a few tweaks to their CC curriculum, be able to get college credit for some of the work that they are doing in their challenge classes. CC+ would be a great thing for these Finnish early teens to look into. But you know what, do you know what you could do?

You could encourage your teenager to find a hobby, a new hobby, a new skill that they would like to practice, to get better at, to explore. Something that they've always been interested in that never makes it into your curriculum for the year. Let them do some reading. Let them do some volunteer work.

Let them go work at a science center or an observatory or a hospital or a retirement center or a farm. Let your child get some real life hands-on work experience to go along with their thinking, their pondering, their philosophizing, their big ideas that they do in class and at home and by themselves.

Give your child time to volunteer, help them add an interest or get a job. These are all good things to do with your teenagers who are finishing early. (mouse clicks) All right. And my last question, how do we know? Somebody has asked this, and this is actually one of the easiest questions to answer, but it is something that we all want to know.

This question is, how do I know what else to buy besides a foundations guide? Besides a foundation, when you go to a book fair, there's a bajillion good things, and you just think, what is it that I need to buy? Or when you go to a classical conversations information meeting and you come home absolutely jazzed up and you've signed up and you're so excited about this new adventure you're gonna have, and then you think, but what do I need to get started?

Everybody just talks about stick in the sand and come to community and memorize the timeline, but surely I need books, what do I need? How do I know what else I need to buy? Here is the best resource that a CC parent can have. It's the catalog, this classical conversations catalog, and you can get that sent to your home.

In the catalog, there is an insert in the middle of the catalog. This year, it is between page 82 and page 83, and it calls it a program shopping list, but I like to think of it as a resource. It is arranged by program, so there is a list for the foundations community, for scribblers at home, for the essentials community, and every level of challenge from A to four, and even some resources for the CC plus college credit for challenge program that I was telling you about.

So this person is specifically asking, what else do I buy for foundation? So on this page, between page 82 and 83 in the catalog, it tells you that highlighted resources, so they are highlighted in gray, highlighted resources are required, and the non-highlighted resources are just recommended. So highlighted is what you have to have in order to really do the program at home, and the non-highlighted ones are resources that will help you explore more or in a different way.

So it's divided into categories. First thing, so Cultivating Classical Leaders. These are awesome books for parents of foundation students or parents who are just beginning with classical education to grab a hold of. Things like "Classical Christian Education Made Approachable" is a really short book. It is really, really easy reading.

You can read it in one sitting. It'll take you about an hour and a half, two hours to read. It gives you a great blueprint of a classical Christian education and how you can do this at home. Then there are other books like "How to Develop a Brilliant Memory," books that parents might want to read in their downtime, but then it tells you what you'll need in community.

There are two resources highlighted, and then memory work flashcards are just recommended. These are things that you could use to practice your memory work, or you can make your own flashcards. So the highlighted resources are the things that you have to have, and the unhighlighted resources are the things that you could use to explore more or to support your program in a different way.

So it goes through all of our strands. So the logic strand, that's your math, that's what you would need, and none of those on the foundation's community list, none of those resources are highlighted because you do not have to purchase any of those in order to be part of a foundation's community.

But remember early on, we said everybody needs a math curriculum, a math program that they're gonna work. So in that section, there are some great suggestions for families to use to do math at home. Then there's a research section. This is kind of like our science stuff, the explorations.

The only thing highlighted in there is 201 Awesome, Magical, Bizarre, and Incredible Experiments. This is a fun book that you and your kids can use as the basis for how you're gonna explore God's world together at home. There are other resources there that are recommended. They're not required. Things like the Acts and Facts Science Cards, which have beautiful artwork, beautiful pictures on the front, and more information that will allow you to explore with your child on the back.

There are books like Lyrical Life Science, different volumes of lyrical life science. It comes with a CD. These are, this is memory work, information set to music, all different types of music. If you're a musical family or your child is an auditory learner, this would be a fun way to learn about mammals or ecology or the human body, but it's recommended, not required.

And then there are some readers that are delightful for that morning read aloud time that we talked about earlier called Exploring the Heavens with Uncle Paul. And some of those resources, the Science Cards, the Lyrical Life Science, the Exploring with Uncle Paul, those are listed by cycle. So in Foundations, we have three cycles that repeat over and over and over again.

This coming fall, we will be in cycle two. So in the catalog, in this year's catalog, when you see, for instance, all three of the Exploring with Uncle Paul books listed, the cycle two is bolded so that you will know that's the reader or the book or the set of cards that is most closely aligned with the cycle we're going into this fall.

So only one required in the Research section, but a lot of recommended and the ones that will most closely follow the upcoming cycle are bolded. There's a Reasoning strand. This has things like art and music, all right? So the highlighted resources for reasoning include Discovering Great Artists, Drawing with Children, and Classical Music for Dummies.

So our children in Foundations will do Music Theory, Ten Whistles, and Music Practice, and Art as part of their Foundations years. And so those are the resources that parents will want to have at home. And then there are some other, there are Artists, Acts and Facts, Artists and Composer cards also that are recommended that you can use.

And the Set 2 will align most closely with Cycle 2, so that's bolded, okay? There are other resources that you might love to have at home that your child might enjoy that have to do with Geography. There are Trivium Tables, Geography. There are Placements for Geography. These are fun things to have, not required, just extras.

In that same Debate section of the Foundations Community List, you'll see the Classical Acts and Facts History cards. These are beautiful. And I will tell you, this is the resource outside of the Foundations curriculum and the 10 Whistle that most families purchase. The Classical Acts and Facts cards align with the timeline that children memorize in Foundations.

They are beautiful cards, a gorgeous piece of artwork reproduced on the front, and a very informative backside that has a map and a timeline and paragraphs of information that you and your child can explore together. And those are the Classical Acts and Facts History cards that are referenced from Scribblers all the way through Challenge.

So this is not a resource that you're gonna be done with right away, or in one year, or even in six years. You're going to use it all the way through high school, okay? There are other really great readers listed on the Foundations Community page that you will want to look at.

We have Senators of Rome, Emperors of Rome, Kings of Rome. And then there are readers that are great for morning time. And the one that most closely aligns with Cycle Two is highlighted there under the Grammar section. And for Exposition, our beautiful Echoes Storybook Readers. These have got stories and fables and poems from all around the world and all across time.

These are beautiful books, beautiful stories with really great illustrations. Old World Echoes is the Cycle Two specific. It goes most closely with Cycle Two. So that one is bolded on your Foundations Community page. They're in the catalog between page 82 and 83 of the 2025 catalog. So that's how you know what else to buy.

Now, another way that you can explore which of those recommended resources you might really receive the most benefit from, ask another family member, ask somebody in your community. Have you used this resource? What did you guys do with it? How helpful was it? What did you love about it?

Which resource sat on the shelf and which resource did you use the most? And how did you use it and why did you love it? I've gotten really great ideas from friends who it turned out were using, say, the timeline cards in ways I had never thought of before.

And so that availing yourself of the experience of your community will give you even more reasons to value some of these recommended resources, okay? As always, your director is also an invaluable resource for determining how your family can get the very most out of the program, okay? Guys, I have enjoyed talking to you so very much today and answering some of your questions.

I hope that you will feel free to send more questions another time and we'll do another Ask Lisa and ask other people too. How about that? As we go, I want you to know that we have great things coming up in the spring and all through the year with Everyday Educator and with Classical Conversations.

You might even wanna go ahead and mark your calendar for our National Events Weekend. It's coming up in May, May 2nd through the 4th in Southern Pines. And so you look, some of the major events will be National Conference, National Commencement, and the National Memory Master Championship. So make your plans, go to classicalconversations.com and you can find more information about our National Events Weekend.

I'll look for you there. Thanks, and I'll see you next time. (upbeat music) you