Languages
Every student chooses a modern language in kindergarten and studies it for nine years. French or Spanish. In sixth grade, everyone adds Latin.
Nine years is the number that matters. Most schools introduce a language in middle school, or rotate children through a sampler of several, and both approaches produce children who can recite colors and numbers and not much else. We went the other way. One language, nine consecutive years, taught seriously enough that a student leaves eighth grade able to use it.
Latin, sixth grade, everyone.
Latin is what makes the modern language click. A student who has been in French or Spanish since kindergarten meets Latin and suddenly sees the machinery underneath: why the verb endings behave that way, where the irregular forms came from, what the two languages have in common. Grammar stops being a set of arbitrary rules and becomes history you can trace.
Choosing.
Families choose at kindergarten entry. Both tracks run parallel, K through 8, with the same hours and the same expectations.
Spanish
Every student chooses a modern language in kindergarten and studies it for nine years. French or Spanish. In sixth grade, everyone adds Latin.
Nine years is the number that matters. Most schools introduce a language in middle school, or rotate children through a sampler of several, and both approaches produce children who can recite colors and numbers and not much else. We went the other way. One language, nine consecutive years, taught seriously enough that a student leaves eighth grade able to use it.
Latin, sixth grade, everyone.
Latin is what makes the modern language click. A student who has been in French or Spanish since kindergarten meets Latin and suddenly sees the machinery underneath: why the verb endings behave that way, where the irregular forms came from, what the two languages have in common. Grammar stops being a set of arbitrary rules and becomes history you can trace.
Choosing.
Families choose at kindergarten entry. Both tracks run parallel, K through 8, with the same hours and the same expectations.
French
French has been part of an Academy education since the beginning, and it is not here out of habit.
French runs kindergarten through eighth grade, the same nine-year arc as Spanish, with the same hours and the same expectations.
We teach it because of what it does to a child's ear and to their thinking. French sounds are not English sounds, and a five-year-old can still hear the difference in a way an adult mostly cannot. Nine years of that builds something a later start does not.
It also sits closest to the rest of what we teach. A student conjugating Latin in sixth grade has already been conjugating in French since kindergarten, and the two illuminate each other immediately. French is the language of a literature students will read for the rest of their education, and it opens onto Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish later with very little friction.
For families who speak French at home, the reasoning is the same as it is for Spanish. The home language becomes academic content, with grammar, literature, and formal writing, taught seriously rather than left to the dinner table.
