An Orthodox Education
Character and religious education is central to the curriculum. The liturgical calendar will be central to the life of the school community, with a school chapel, school liturgy services, and eventually a full-time priest on staff. School and faculty will begin and end each day with Prayer of the Hours, have weekly chapel services including a Divine Liturgy, and daily religious instruction. Students will be required to perform a certain number of hours of community service.
Our faculty will be Orthodox teachers who are highly qualified professional educators. We will only hire faculty and staff who will model godly character to our young people, that God would be glorified in every aspect of the school and that our students would be taught to glorify God in all things.
A Classical Education
Students will receive a Classical education based on the Trivium model. The Classical model, esteemed since Greek, Roman, and medieval times, is known as the Trivium, meaning triple-way. The Trivium recognizes three stages of mental and physiological development in children with corresponding stages of learning.
The Grammar stage, Lower School grades 1-4, focuses on learning the facts of language, math, history, and science. The Logic stage, Middle School grades 5-8, centers on critical thinking to make truthful connections, deductions, and inferences using the facts learned in the Grammar stage. Finally, the Rhetoric stage, Upper School grades 9-12, concentrates on developing and mastering truthful expression, meaningful discourse, and skillful persuasion.
The curriculum will be rigorous, and thus college preparatory. Every effort will be made, due to the excellence of the faculty and the small class sizes, to insure that every student succeeds. Creativity will be encouraged and fostered at all levels.
The main goal of the curriculum is to build skills, knowledge, confidence and creativity, in a forum designed to create student success.
Why Teach Classical Languages?
Research demonstrates that a solid grounding in Classical Latin and Greek dramatically improves students' academic performance in multiple subjects, as well as on college entrance exams (e.g. SAT). Since 60-70% of English is derived from Latin, and another 12-15% from Greek, students who study these languages from a very early age surpass their peers in several key areas:
- they have much larger and more sophisticated vocabularies
- they read more easily because they can decode difficult words they encounter
- they have increased reading comprehension
- they excel at mathematics
- they comprehend the grammar of English better
- they can acquire a foreign language more easily
- they are better writers
- they gain a deeper, sustained knowledge of ancient history through context
- they score higher on standardized tests
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