Classical Conversations, an internationally-utilized home schooling program, is making its way to Plant City in time for the upcoming school year.
The program will soon be hosted at Evangelical Presbyterian Church. It will be the first campus in the Winter Strawberry Capital of the World, but far from the first in the surrounding area.
“Classical Conversations is huge in Lakeland,” organizer Jessica Caporale said. “There are six campuses there and five in Brandon.”
Caporale, who lives in Valrico but worships at Evangelical Presbyterian, is mainly responsible for bringing the program to the church. She said because of Plant City’s budding home schooling community, a program like this could be beneficial to both students and parents looking for a high-quality curriculum and structure with a Christian focus.
Classical Conversations, according to Caporale, isn’t traditional.
Once per week, parents and children in the program will meet at the church to go over the curriculum and the week’s learning activities. These equipping meetings are often held on Mondays. They will begin August 17.
“It’s kind of like college,” Caporale says. “You go to one class, then you have that whole week to work on homework before going back.”
Also similar is that the program is broken up into two 12-week semesters per year, split by a winter break in December. The school year will run from August to April.
The program is not a co-op, meaning that parents will not be paying for someone to tutor their children for them. Instead, the parents are the tutors. The Classical Conversations structure is set up to make tutoring as manageable as possible for the parents while also giving students a good education.
“Being a parent is hard, but so is homeschooling,” Caporale said.
The program’s website has a plethora of resources available for parents and students, including a bookstore, forums and tutorials, downloadable resources and more.
Classical Conversations has around 87,000 students enrolled in America, and is currently utilized in Asia, Australia, Canada, Africa, Europe and the Caribbean. Military families are fond of the program, according to Caporale.
It uses the classical educational model, methods of which were alluded to in the Old Testament and practiced beginning in ancient Greece. The model involves three phases of learning: grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. The website lists notable people, such as Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Jefferson and C.S. Lewis, as being products of the model.
Contact Justin Kline at jkline@plantcityobserver.com.
THE MODEL
Classical Conversations uses the classical educational model, which focuses on three phases of learning: grammar, dialectic and rhetoric.
The Grammar Stage: Learning the words and terms associated with a subject. The first step in learning any subject is to learn the vocabulary. For example, when you learn to read, you learn the names of the letters and the sounds they make.
The Dialectic Stage: Asking questions, sorting, comparing and practicing the knowledge learned in the grammar stage. The second step in learning a subject is to sort, compare and understand the words and the rules that apply to them. For example, when learning to read, students will learn how to put letters together to form words and how to construct a sentence.
The Rhetoric Stage: Communicating the truth of the subjects learned in the dialectic stage through writing, speech or conversation. The third stage in learning a subject is to use what you’ve learned to solve a problem, write an original paper or speech, or lead a discussion. In reading, this would be the time to focus on the themes and context of what you have read and to apply the lessons learned.
SOURCE: Classical Conversations