Curriculum

The New Classical Academy curriculum combines individualized progression through the basics--reading, arithmetic and mathematics, and handwriting--with a rotating school-wide course of study in the sciences, history, and literature. As students gain mastery of the more mechanical aspects of scholarship, they are able to manage increasingly advanced presentation and exploration of the material.

What Is a Classical Education?
A classical education is shaped by the concept of the “trivium”: three progressive stages of learning that mirror and leverage children’s natural cognitive development in order to cultivate academic growth. The trivium gives students first the knowledge, then the understanding, and finally the creativity to approach each subject in the fullest way.

During the grammar stage (roughly, elementary school), students learn the rules of all their subjects—phonics, reading, spelling, grammar, and basic computation. They also accumulate facts, expanding their vocabulary, memorizing geography, and acquiring information about history, science, the animal kingdom, and more.

In the logic stage (roughly, middle school), as their capacity for conceptualization grows, students begin to apply abstract thought to the material they encounter. They not only learn the principles of formal logic but are also taught to look for “logic” across all subjects—the cause and effect of an historical event, for example, a chemical reaction, or the structure of a well-written paragraph.

With this foundation, students graduate from our school well prepared for the rhetoric stage of high school, when they are expected to develop and test their own hypotheses, analyze texts and other material, and formulate their own persuasive arguments.

A classically educated student also studies Latin, great works of literature, and history in a continuum from ancient to modern.

Why We Teach Latin
Latin is one of the components of a classical education. Since Latin is the foundation of the English language, it reinforces students' understanding of vocabulary and grammar and helps with the later acquisition of the technical vocabulary of the sciences. We introduce students to Latin forms during the grammar stage, when memorization is easy and fun.