Online Parent Handbook |
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Introduction and Overview |
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Curriculum Overview |
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How We Teach, How Students Learn |
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Assignment Expectations |
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Materials |
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The Whole - PAideia - Child |
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Parent Education |
PAideia has selected a chronologically unified approach to studying history, humanities, and literature through a four-year study.
Years One and Three utilize reading of classic works at every age level. Years Two and Four demand more student research and writing.
As primary subjects of study, English (literature, grammar, and composition), Latin, Logic and Rhetoric are interwoven into all lessons as well as studied alone.
Each year as students study specific time periods, history, humanities, philosophy, and literature are intricately connected in the Culturative History class.
Electives in art, science, theater arts, and music are also integrated with the culturative history lesson to enhance the classical education experience.
With slight variations, the historical divisions fall as follows;
Culturative History (“CH”) combines history, literature, art, architecture, music, geography, political science, religion, speech, and philosophy in a four year study of western civilization.
Culturative History is the hub of the PAideia curriculum. We teach it in a two-hour intensive class every week.
Our youngest students in the Grammar Stage of the trivium literally learn the “grammar”—rules—of the language they speak. The structure of the language, its phonetic principles, and its spelling and punctuation systems dominate learning.
As students enter the Dialectic stage, the logic of grammar itself takes over. Dialectic students master how to connect subjects, predicates, participles, and direct objects. They learn how to link ideas logically into paragraphs and then essays. The ability to create a logical series of ideas with coordinating transitions blossoms at this age. Dialectic students learn that literary plots build, climax, and resolve. Poetry is more than enjoyable rhyme; it has predictable forms that can be replicated.
Creativity matures in Rhetoric students. Having mastered the essay, they can experiment with the form and purpose of their writing. Expressive and precise vocabulary, along with explaining a position in a persuasive and winsome way become ways to share their own personality and opinion.
English and Culturative History are integrally and vitally connected in Paideia. A basic educational principle is that students master a topic as they synthesize the subject into their own consciousness and restate the material as their own. Both classes follow the same era each year: when history classes are studying Queen Elizabeth I, English classes will be discussing The Faerie Queene. Culturative History provides the input, discovering art, music, wars, politics, kings and philosophy; English trains the output as students fuse what they have absorbed into innovative, articulate formats.
The first and most basic type of writing young students learn is the paragraph, followed by the expository essay. This composition is a series of connected paragraphs, each answering the basic questions who, what, when, where, why, and how. It is a simple report, and reads like an encyclopedia or newspaper article.
Building on expository skills, a comparison-contrast essay shows how two topics are the same, and how they differ. It usually includes some of the expository facts as it shows similarities and distinctions.
Narrative essays tell stories and can be written in first person, as opposed to more formal writing. A descriptive essay stirs imagination and stretches the author’s expressive word choices as he paints a scene or character in the reader’s thoughts.
Dialectic students learn to persuade their readers with logical arguments unified with transitional words and phrases that directs the reader to the same conclusion. This persuasive essay leads to writing editorials and letters to the editor.
Once basic writing skills are well established, rhetoric students move into more complex compositions. They will use expository writing to probe causes and effects or problems and solutions. They evaluate literature by taking each literary element of a work and scrutinizing it in a literary analysis essay. They will use comparison and contrast skills to develop an opposing viewpoints essay which probes philosophies or arguments and evaluates the merits of the claims.
The various types of writing are taught gradually and sequentially through two complete 4 year cycles. Click HERE to view a chart that explains when, through each cycle, we teach and practice all major types of writing.
Equally important as the skill of writing, and equally as hard to develop is the ability to proofread, edit, correct, and improve one’s compositions. In the hurry to finish homework and check “to-do’s” off a list, proofreading and editing steps seem to be expendable measures and parents often allow them to slide. Resist this temptation! Omitting this step neglects half of the objective for any composition assignment (and is obvious to the grader).
To help families learn to proofread and correct student writing, the PAideia Proofreading Checklist should be filled in for every written English assignment, initialed, and stapled to the front of the paper. Papers without an attached and initialed Proofreading Checklist will not be evaluated. You can print copies from the PAiedeia website under Standard English Forms.
IEW stands for the Institute for Excellence in Writing , an approach to composition by Andrew Padua and Andrew Kern.
All entering dialectic and rhetoric students must complete a short intensive course in IEW techniques as soon as possible after registration. IEW gives student writers simple and practical tools that they can apply right away, which yield an immediate improvement in writing. To see a summary of IEW techniques, look for the IEW Standards in the Member's Area under “English Resources.”
The study of cultures through history drives our curriculum, and the power- train of that study is great classical literature. Each year the History and English classes read and analyze ten or more literary works (often lower levels will read an adaptation of the original). The schematic for taking us through the work is a short booklet called a study guide, produced by PACES Publishing, that gives a synopsis, a biography of the author, relevant background material, lesson plans and educational activities for the study.
Samples of study guides include:
Our web-based homework charts give the scheduling of study. If there is a discrepancy in due dates or assignments, always follow the homework chart.
To round out a classical education, students must complete studies in one or both of the classical languages (Latin and Greek) and courses in Logic and Rhetoric. A combination of these classes is offered every year and are included in the base tuition.
Additionally, students may choose from electives in art, science, mathematics, theater art, speech, contemporary foreign languages, apologetics, and music to integrate with the culturative history lesson, enhancing the classical education experience.
The headmaster on each campus determines if an elective has enough students enrolled to make a full class, and sets the schedule. Some classes are school-wide (the theater arts department often produces one or more plays each year) and some are privately tutored (instrumental music lessons and math coaching).
You will find the homework assignments for electives on the website member's area each quarter in homework charts.
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PACES and the PAideia Classical Education Program do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national or ethnic
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