John Adams Academy delivers a high-quality American Classical Leadership Education® by facilitating scholar engagement with the greatest books of the Western Tradition and history. We seek to inspire our scholars to become persons of virtue who can identify, understand, seek, and share what is good, true, and beautiful. John Adams Academy develops scholars who are virtuous leaders in their homes, communities, and country who naturally hunger for oncoming responsibilities and future contributions to society.

Classical Structure

Liberal Arts

Since ancient times, individual liberty was cultivated through the development of the abilities to learn truth, to reason soundly, and to express truth eloquently through the Trivium—Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric—followed by higher arts including the Quadrivium—Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy. These traditional liberal arts expand innate faculties to pursue truth through participating in the Great Conversation.

They liberate a person to discover and understand things as they truly are. Cultivating wisdom and virtue to act on that knowledge ultimately ennobles an individual to love and serve.

The classical model of education teaches first the "grammar" or basic ideas, skills, concepts, language, and methods of a given subject.

Once mastery of the "grammar" of a subject has been achieved, students are taught formal logic and reasoning as they explore the connections and implications of the concepts they have learned.

When children are astonished with the human tongue, we teach them language and grammar. When children are ready to challenge every assumption, we teach them logic. When students are yearning to express themselves with passion, we teach them rhetoric.

Christopher Perrin

The final stage of classical education is that of "rhetoric" or the art of persuasively expressing to others the implications of the knowledge they have acquired through the first two stages of learning. It is during the rhetoric stage that pupils in the classical model find and express their own voice in the "great conversation" of the western tradition, and become "scholars" who attempt to ethically influence the world around them through skillful presentation of the knowledge they possess.

While classical learning is intended to progress roughly along this trajectory, the path to "scholarship" is rarely linear. At any given time, the scholars at John Adams Academy are engaged in all three stages of classical learning and are constantly seeking to improve their understanding of the world.

The content of American Classical Leadership Education® is values based, and focused on the ideals of liberty, virtue, morality, entrepreneurship, and democracy. American Classical Leadership Education® is distinct from modern educational systems in both structure and content.

K

Kindergarten

Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See?
Bill Martin Jr.

The Three Little Pigs
Paul Galdone

The Three Billy Goats Gruff
Paul Galdone

Little Red Riding Hood
Trina Schart

Goldilocks and the Three Bears
Paul Galdone

1

1st Grade

Frog and Toad
Arnold Lobel

All of a Kind Family
Sydney Taylor

Owl at Home
Arnold Lobel

Children’s Book of America
William J. Bennett

Beatrix Potter
Series

2

2nd Grade

The Tale of Despereaux
Kate DiCamillo

The Wizard of Oz
L. Frank Baum

Little House on the Prairie
Laura Ingalls Wilder

My Father's Dragon
Ruth Stiles Gannett

Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle
Betty MacDonald

3

3rd Grade

Charlotte's Web
E.B. White

Stone Fox
John Reynolds Gardiner

Misty of Chincoteague
Marguerite Henry

Because of Winn-Dixie
Kate DiCamillo

Stuart Little
E.B. White

4

4th Grade

Pollyanna
Elanor H. Porter

The Cricket in Times Square
George Selden

Little Britches
Ralph Moody

Island of the Blue Dolphins
Scott O’Dell

Summer of the Monkeys
Wilson Rawls

5

5th Grade

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
C.S. Lewis

Johnny Tremain
Esther Forbes

A Little Princess
Frances Hodgson Burnett

Old Yeller
Fred Gipson

Carry On, Mr. Bowditch
Jean Lee Latham

6

6th Grade

The Hobbit
JRR Tolkien

Where the Red Fern Grows
Wilson Rawls

White Fang
Jack London

Trojan War
Olivia Coolidge

Anne of Green Gables
L M Montgomery

7

7th Grade

Animal Farm
George Orwell

My Antonia
Willa Cather

Little Women
Louisa May Alcott,

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson

Pericles
William Shakespeare

8

8th Grade

To Kill A Mockingbird
Harper Lee

Lord of the Flies
William Goulding

The Hiding Place
Corrie Ten Boom

Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury

Red Scarf Girl
Ji Li Jiang

Merchant of Venice
William Shakespeare

9

9th Grade

The Fellowship of the Ring
JRR Tolkien

The Iliad
Homer

As a Man Thinketh
James Allen

Ender's Game
Orson Scott Card

Till We Have Faces
CS Lewis

Julius Caesar
William Shakespeare

10

10th Grade

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
Mark Twain

Inferno
Dante Alighieri

Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens

Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austin

Richard II
Shakespeare

Curriculum