Course Catalog

*Currently serving students in Oregon, Washington, Texas, Arizona, N.C., Florida, and Minnesota

Curriculum

20 pages of exercises in reading comprehension, vocabulary, writing, punctuation, and grammar are provided weekly.

Instruction

Class instruction is one hour online or in person. Class begins with a review of the previous week's homework, and all corrections are explained to the student. Next, students complete exercises in each section of the new homework assignment to demonstrate their understanding. The remainder of the class is focused on teacher-student interaction and productivity. Homework is collected the following week when class begins.

Tuition

Tuition is 40.00/class for individuals or 35.00/class for siblings. There are no registration fees, cancellation fees, or contracts. If a student is unable to attend a class, the student has the option of rescheduling or skipping the class entirely. 

First Class Free

To ensure that our students are happy with the class and feel comfortable in the environment, there is no charge for the first day of attendance. 

*Currently serving students in Oregon, Washington, Texas, Arizona, N.C., Florida, and Minnesota

Middle School Writing Program

Our middle school writing program focuses on argumentative, narrative, and opinion writing. 

Argumentative - Students read about new issues weekly, take a position on the topic, and write a complete essay to defend their position. They will learn about structure, logical progression, proper transitions, topic sentences, supporting evidence, thesis statements, body paragraphs, critical commentary, counter arguments, and concluding paragraphs. We will teach them how to clearly connect the key points in their essays, enabling their teachers to easily follow their arguments and locate the necessary information in the proper location. They will also learn how to analyze supporting evidence and discern between strong and weak evidence. 

Narrative - Students will learn how each phase of the narrative writing process works together to form a clear and complete picture of the story. Narrative terms, such as character development, setting, situation, conflict, rising action, climax, and dénouement will also be explained, so that students have the knowledge to discuss them confidently in their classes at school. 

Opinion - Students will voice their opinions on a topic and support their opinion with reasons. Different from argumentative writing, opinion writing is supported with reasons rather than evidence. Opinion writing also does not try to persuade the reader but rather explains an opinion and why the writer has that opinion.  The proper structure, logical progression, and components of each paragraph will be clearly explained to provide students with a solid understanding of the process. 

Note: Students who approach their writing practice with patience will discover that writing their school assignments will become much easier, and their writing scores will significantly improve.   All students are welcome to audit a class at no cost prior to enrollment.

Advanced Writing Program 

Our advanced writing program focuses on literary analysis and argumentative essays. Literary analysis helps our students to develop their abstract thinking skills and learn how to convert abstract ideas into logical expression. They will learn how to identify themes, write a strong thesis, and construct solid arguments to support abstract interpretations of the literature. In addition to writing thesis statements based on themes in the literature, students will explore the author's use of literary devices. 

The argumentative component is similar to that of our middle school program: Students will read about new issues weekly, take a position on the topic, and write a complete essay to defend their position. They will learn about structure, logical progression, proper transitions, topic sentences, supporting evidence, thesis statements, body paragraphs, critical commentary, counter arguments, and concluding paragraphs.

Our instructors have been teaching standardized tests year-round for 15 years. Those tests include ITBS, CogAT, PSAT, SAT, ACT, GRE, LSAT, and GMAT.  During that time, our students have achieved more than 30 perfect SAT scores in English.  

Some of our SAT students have moved on to attend such prestigious universities as Harvard, Stanford, and M.I.T. to name a few.

Our grade school students' ITBS and CogAT scores have helped many of them to gain entrance into T.A.G. and SUMMA programs over the years. 

Public speaking is a learned skill that can benefit students from very young ages into their adult lives. The sooner this skill is learned, the more comfortable students will be speaking in front of others. These skills are useful in many ways, from better grades to better interviews to better job skills. They are also valuable to students planning to participate in speech and debate clubs and competitions in middle school and high school.

These classes will cover:

• Research and Speech Writing
• Speaking Techniques
• Evaluations 
• Final in Front of an Audience

Reading comprehension is one of the most challenging aspects of English, and many students find it to be the most difficult part of standardized testing.  For that reason, we have designed a class that is committed purely to teaching students how to analyze and interpret what they read.  Instruction will be aligned with the Common Core Standards for each grade level. 

• Selecting supporting evidence
• Using context clues to understand unfamiliar words
• Identifying the theme or central idea
• Understanding literary terms, literary elements, and literary devices
• Analyzing story structure