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Wyss, J. D. The Swiss Family Robinson.
Bauer, Susan Wise, Writing With Skill.
Writing With Skill makes it more difficult to integrate writing across the curriculum, but in exchange provides an open-and-go classical writing program.
Institute for Excellence in Writing series.
The structural part of IEW is much sounder than the stylistic part.
Writing Strands is best suited to students who need the writing process broken down into small steps; students who are naturally creative, but resist expository writing; and students who prefer to work independently.
SUBJECT: Foreign languages (classical and modern) TIME REQUIRED: 3 hours or more per week
Your goal in the middle grades is to expose the student to both ancient and modern languages.
We recommend continuing with Latin until the student has mastered a standard (high-school level) second-year Latin course; this can happen any time between sixth and twelfth grade. At that point, the student who’s interested in Greek can switch; the student who’s not interested at all can quit. Other students should continue on to the reading of actual Latin texts.
One caution: language skills tend to disappear if they’re not constantly used.
Plan on studying at least one foreign language for at least three hours per week. Five to seven hours per week is ideal;
Option 1: Two Languages Quickly Modern language 1 hour per day, 3–4 days per week Latin 1 hour per day, 3–4 days per week
If you chose to work through Prima Latina or The Big Book of Lively Latin, progress on to Latina Christiana I. After completing Latina I, the student can continue on to First Form Latin;
If you began with Song School Latin and progressed to Latin for Children Primer A, or simply began with Latin for Children Primer A, you can continue on with Primer B and Primer C. Primer C is then followed by Latin Alive!
Latin for Children. Camp Hill, PA: Classical Academic Press.
Latin for Children Primer A. $99.95. Latin for Children Primer B. $114.95.
Latina Christiana: An Introduction to Christian Latin. Louisville, KY: Memoria Press, 2001.
Form Latin series. Louisville, KY: Memoria Press.
Visit the Duolingo website for online tutorials and language options.
These questions cannot be answered unless you take the role of religion in public life seriously. People of faith have influenced history at every turn. Until the student is willing to examine honestly and soberly the claims of religion in the history of mankind, his study will be incomplete.
As you progress through history, stop and read the Old and New Testaments; they are foundational to Western thought and ought to be treated as serious philosophical documents.
Read about major faiths that have shaped our world: Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam.
SUBJECT: Art and music TIME REQUIRED: 1 to 2 hours or more, once per week per subject
Your middle-grade student will learn about the basic structure of musical pieces, the differences among the instruments of the orchestra, the way paints and other artistic media are used, and the different art movements and their practitioners.
Reserve a one- to two-hour period once a week for music study; reserve the same amount of time on another day for art.
The study of art and music is a good late-afternoon or early-evening project.
Whether or not the student is taking music lessons, he should spend one and a half to two hours every week doing music appreciation.
This time should involve the study of composers’ lives, as well as an introduction to musical instruments and musical forms.
Reading about the lives of composers (and musicians) should be part of...
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During music appreciation, he should record the birth and death dates on the time line, read a brief biography, and spend the rest of his music-appreciation period listening to the composer’s works.
Artistic Pursuits:
Edwards, Betty. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: The Definitive 4th Edition. New York: Tarcher, 2012.
Venezia, Mike. Getting to Know the World’s Greatest Artists series.
Venezia, Mike. Getting to Know the World’s Greatest Composers series.
Begin typing instruction any time from fifth grade on, and continue until students are completely at ease with the keyboard.
Watch after preparation. Once you’ve already studied a subject, a program becomes a vehicle for building more connections,
The exception to this rule can be filmed versions of plays, which, after all, were written to be seen.
The logic stage is a time of growing independence, both mental and practical. As the student begins to form her own opinions, she also should begin to take responsibility for parts of her daily life.
If the child does her assignments regularly, you can begin to assign her a day’s work at a time and check in with her at the end of the day to make sure she’s finished. If she doesn’t complete the work, supervise more closely.
She doesn’t do her assignments because you’re nagging her; she does them because the assignments have to be done by Friday so that she can move on to the next week’s lessons because she wants to have enough time over the summer to do no school at all.
Although Memoria Press suggests beginning the course in fourth or fifth grade, we find it much more valuable for students to work on the outlining and organization skills we describe in the middle grades and turn to the progymnasmata in high school. Students who have made use of our earlier recommendations will be able to move quickly through the early books. We suggest the following plan: Ninth grade I: Fable Stage II: Narrative Stage III: Chreia/Maxim Stage Tenth grade IV: Refutation/Confirmation Stage V: Common Topic Stage Eleventh grade VI: Encomium/Invective/Comparison Stage VII:
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Teaching Writing: Structure and Style.
Building Securely: English 7.
Bauer, Susan Wise. The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome.
Bauer, Susan Wise. The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade.
Bauer, Susan Wise. The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had,
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859)
The classically educated student has other purposes in mind: ideally, the mastery of one foreign language (the equivalent of four years of study, resulting in the ability to read literature fluently), and the beginning study at the high-school level (two years) of another. One of these languages should be ancient Greek or Latin, while the other should be a modern spoken language.
The student with a strong interest in the classics could substitute Greek I and Greek II for a modern foreign language, while continuing with the study of Latin through Latin IV.
As mentioned before, we strongly recommend the study of Spanish for the modern foreign-language requirement; French, Italian, German, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and Hebrew are also possibilities.
