Daily Review - What Works For Us

My girls are auditory learns all the way. It doesn't matter if the History Sentence Cards look fun, or if the Geography Cards are pretty - nope - doesn't interest them much. How dare they! No, instead, just listening to the music (how boring, right?! ;)  ) while having busy hands is the best way for them to internalize the new material. (Yes, that's right, my kids don't like my printables! Oh, the irony!)

So, I make playlists, lots of playlists. I have a playlist for each week of CC, a History playlist for each semester, and a Science playlist by semester. Here's a little peek (click to enlarge):

We're on Week 5 at our house, so on this week's playlist I have History, Latin (twice in a row; the song is short so we hear it two times this way, obviously), Science, Math, English Grammar, and my homemade Geography song.

We use Google Play on our laptop and Cloud Play on the iPad, which we use at the kitchen table. I love that Google syncs the music to my phone, too, so it goes there automatically for easy review in the car.

Now, you may notice that not all of these are from the CC audio CDs. CC doesn't do official songs for all the subjects. So, I get all my Science and English Grammar songs from C3 (also called CC Connected; search for user NoGreaterJoy5, and be sure the mp3s say 2013 in the titles). For Geography, I search Youtube for songs already created, and if I don't find one that works for us, I just make my own. Here's what I did for Week 5 (and please excuse my poor singing voice!):

(This fantastic map is from C3 user heathergwyn!)

But wait, you may say. Why make a Youtube video of a Geography song? 

I make the video and upload it to youtube so I can turn it into an mp3! Aaaaah!!! Isn't that cool?! I had no idea this was even possible! I love it! If you google 'Youtube video to mp3,' you'll find plenty of sites that offer this free (and very quick!) service. 

Now, you do have to be careful if you use this for other things. You absolutely do not want to 'steal' music by doing this, and I know none of you would. I only make mp3s out of my own videos or non-copyrighted homemade videos from other CC mamas (click here for a video-turned-mp3 we use in our Week 4 playlist).

Once we have the playlist for the week, we just listen, listen, listen. Mary and Anna pick it up so quickly just while we're driving in the car. No visuals, no fun cards to scramble and unscramble (much to my chagrin!), just plain ol' boring listening; however, it works for them! Pretty cool!

I'm just happy to feel like we're getting in a groove over here. It's a peaceful little feeling. :)