Art and Humor in Challenge A
In the Reasoning strand, there are catechism questions your student will memorize. The catechism questions are facts and snippets derived from It Couldn't Just Happen. These pegs of information are deemed worthy of memorizing. You need to learn and review these catechism questions just like you would Foundations memory work in a question and answer format. Regular review of these questions is needed through the entire year.
The most popular way to do this is by creating flashcards for the catechism questions. We felt that the flashcards were cumbersome and didn't allow for much creativity. Many Challenge A students are already making a myriad of flashcards for Latin and we needed to find something different. One great tool to be aware of is Quizlet. Quizlet is a flashcard App and you can get anything and everything on it. However, after using it for a few weeks, we realize that electronic flashcards did not help with long-term retention. Our solution was to get creative and have fun with our catechisms.
Each week The Challenge A Guide will assign you three to five catechism questions. They are all listed on pages 160 and 164 of the guide. We made a notebook page for each catechism question. I am not joking when I say we started simple; a piece of paper and some crayons. As we had more fun with it our art skills and storyboards became more elaborate. Here are some examples:
Here is one of my favorites I created for my daughter.
Catechism Question number 3 is about the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states things left to themselves will decay. As you can see, I used my awesome art skills to draw a little picture of what her room looks like clean and what it looks like a couple of days later.
She decided to get a little bit more silly on number 34 where the questions is a fact about termites. She did a cartoon about a termite having gas and disrupting the temperature of the termite mound. Everyone had a good laugh. She loved sharing her creations with her brothers and me.
“Humor can be one of our best survival tools - Allen Klein”
The second semester we brought in some technology and we used her iPad and Apple Pencil. She started creating her pages on an App called Notability. This option was fun because she was able to import photos and other images such as memes. For one question, she has a picture of Jesus riding a dinosaur. It makes zero sense to me but it makes sense to her.
Making sure you review your catechisms on a weekly basis. Reviewing previous weeks work is key to long-term retention. After the first semester, you will have a good amount of catechism questions. At this point, we started reviewing them by category, bible, theory, animals, miscellaneous. I
In conclusion, you want to do what works for your student. You want your student to discover what form of studying works best for them. If your kid is a visual learner then get them doing something visual. If you have a kinesthetic learner have them make up hand motions. If songs are your student's thing find songs. ( I have not found all of the catechism songs on CC Connected.) Take all your Foundation skills and apply them here and find a method that works well for your child. Help them discover what ways of studying make the most sense to them.
Challenge A is a lot of hard work but don’t forget to have fun!