When Failures Turn into Blessings
I think I stumbled upon genius this year in a fabulous way to use Classical Conversations' prescripts books. There are several varieties, but the one my daughter was working on followed the current year's history memory work. However, with all of the wonderful things I planned that year, we were destined to drop something.
Let me explain - I am a first class list maker. I love making schedules, plotting out our course, and checking off boxes as we complete tasks. The problem is that typically my eyes are bigger than my stomach and I try to heap mounds of great things into our schedule that we just won't be able to accomplish in a day, let alone a year. What inevitably happens is something (or things) don't get finished. That is precisely what happened with our first year using the prescripts.
One of my favorite parts of the prescripts books is the art element. They have lovely art projects throughout. When my daughter arrives at an art lesson, she spends ample time creating masterpieces...or maybe just avoiding moving on to the next copy work. I prefer to believe the first. Valuing hard work, I never pushed her to move on too quickly. Unfortunately the end of the CC year arrived, and we were maybe a quarter of the way finished with our handwriting book.
I decided instead of buying another book, we would just continue in this same prescripts book until we finished it. That is where the genius came in.
Let me pause real quick and also insert that another expectation that always seems to elude me is reviewing previous memory work while working on the current memory work. What I discovered was that as we began our next year, by finishing out the old prescript book, my daughter was reviewing her history memory work naturally!
We finished up the book this year and I think I'll buy last cycle's book to continue the reviewing while working on our handwriting. If it's your first year in CC, this won't work so well, but if you fall behind in your first year using the prescripts, know that you can just keep going and use your time in prescripts as a review in the next year.
Betsy Strauss is an unexpected homeschooler, mother of three, who is in a relationship with a sweet man for life. She loves reading books, drinking coffee, and learning anything with her kids.