Reading, Writing, Grammar--and Thinking!
CLASSES
Now registering for 2024-25 classes!
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Southbridge Fellowship Student Building
12621 Strickland Rd, Raleigh
ENGLISH 1: ADVENTURES IN AIR, LAND, AND {FANTA} SEA
Grade level: 8+ Day/Time: Thursdays 10:45a-12:15p Tuition: $500, including $100 deposit
Great adventures enthrall readers with danger, laughter, hair-breadth escapes, mystery, tragedy, and a hero to embrace. Stories that fit these characteristics provide truly engaging experiences as well as heroes that last beyond the closing cover. Through time-tested literature that has charmed young readers for generations — Around the World in Eighty Days, The Horse and His Boy, Hatchet, Island of the Blue Dolphins, and Redwall, as well as the more recent true story of Ernest Shackleton in Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World—English 1 students will relish the adventure and find heroes and heroines to laugh with, admire, and learn from. Along the way, we'll also learn literary analysis, grammar, and writing -- this comprehensive class covers all the elements of English Language Arts in a single course. For those inexperienced writers who feel that nothing ruins a good story like an essay assignment, this course helps build confidence and even pleasure in the academic writing process. I’ll provide step-by-step direction, encouragement, and individual feedback to help even the most reluctant writer find a voice in personal and formal expression. And since writing well requires functional knowledge of the mechanics of English, students learn practical grammar that puts them in charge of their word choices and sentence construction. This is a busy year, but it’s fruitful and fun. Students leave the course confidently ready to apply and develop their skills in analytical reading, expository writing, and effective self-expression.
ENGLISH 2: MYSTERIES AND MORE
Grade level 9+ Day/ Time: Thursdays 12:30-2:00pm Tuition: $450, including $50 deposit
Come along as we figure out if Google really is making us stupid, what contents the dead man’s pockets hold, and whodunit with Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie. In English 2, we will unravel these mysteries and more through engaging literature diversity that offers readers nonfiction essays, numerous short stories, novels The Hound of the Baskervilles and Animal Farm, drama The Mousetrap, and extensive poetry. With such a varied body of literature, even those who don’t prefer reading will likely find a piece or two that intrigues them. Those that do prefer time with the printed page will have an array of pieces to look forward to over the year. Of course, discussion can happen in conversation and in composition, and in this class, we’ll have plenty of both. Students will gain step by step review and support in academic essay writing, firming up skills in thesis and claim construction as well as effective elaboration and integrating research. Additionally, students will be introduced with guided instruction to analytical writing, currently the most important skill set for high school and college composition success. Alongside these elements, we’ll study grammar as an asset to good writing, something to be applied, not as a set of rules or trivia, but as a real-life aid to communicating well. We’ll have a busy year, but a productive one filled with interesting characters both in the stories and around our conversation table.
ENGLISH 3: TIMELESS TRUTHS
Grade level 10+ Day/ Time: Thursdays 9:00-10:30am Tuition: $450, including $50 deposit
Stories offer insights into ourselves, our world, and our history, but as we’ll read in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, to discover those truths, we must take the time to read and interact with texts-- thinking, processing, drawing conclusions, and discussing in both written and oral forms. English 3 provides that opportunity as it encourages students to think through the implications of power in Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, the value of hope in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, the persistence that pushes through adversity in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, and the unseen battle behind life’s temporal veil in C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. Other short stories, poetry, and the biblical books of Ruth, Esther, and Daniel will build into these universal themes. Melding real life skills with the academic world’s expectations, composition will take students through a variety of formats from the traditional essay, college prep literary analysis, and the everyday, practical structures of narrative and persuasive pieces that employ advanced rhetoric and style. Additionally, students will develop a stronger understanding of words themselves through a morpheme study of Latin and Greek roots. As we close our year of study together, students will have grown as well-read, expressive critical thinkers ready to take on further upper-level literature and composition electives or CCP English coursework with ease.