Reading Comprehension (Classical)

Classical education has always treated reading the way law school treats case analysis: every claim has to be traceable to the text, every word has a history, and a well-trained student can take an argument apart line by line. This nine-week program builds those habits in Grade 6 the old-fashioned way — through formal rhetorical analysis, Latin and Greek etymology, and the systematic comparison of competing texts that once produced lawyers, ministers, and statesmen.

Week 1 introduces the discipline of citing text — quoting accurately, attributing carefully, the basics of close reading as classical scholars practiced it. Week 2 sharpens that into formal citation work: the difference between direct quotation and paraphrase, why each has its place, and how to wield both as proof. Week 3 turns to vocabulary, but not as a list to memorize. Your child learns to break unfamiliar words back into Latin and Greek roots, build derivation chains, and notice the difference between what a word means in a dictionary and what it connotes in the hands of a skilled writer.

Rhetoric and Argument

Weeks 4 through 6 move into the heart of classical rhetoric. Week 4 introduces the four rhetorical modes — narration, description, exposition, argumentation — and teaches your child to see how a skilled author weaves them together. Week 5 brings in Aristotle’s three appeals: ethos, logos, pathos. Twenty-three centuries later these are still the levers every persuasive writer pulls, and a student who can name them is a student who is harder to manipulate.

Week 6 is the logic week. Ad hominem, straw man, false dilemma, appeal to popularity — the named fallacies that turn up everywhere once a reader knows the labels. The worksheets walk through formal evaluation: state the claim, identify the evidence, locate where the reasoning breaks. This is the kind of work that pays off long after middle school, every time your child encounters an argument designed to bypass their judgment.

Synthesis and Comparison

Weeks 7 and 8 raise the stakes. Week 7 pairs two nonfiction passages on the same topic and asks your child to map them systematically — where do the authors agree, where do they diverge, which one’s evidence holds up under scrutiny? Week 8 flips the exercise. Now your child is the writer, marshaling evidence from multiple sources into their own structured argument, anticipating counterarguments the way a classical orator would have prepared a courtroom defense.

Week 9 is the capstone. Two contrasting passages, every skill from the previous eight weeks brought to bear. Citation, etymology, rhetorical appeals, logical evaluation, comparative analysis, original argument. The final worksheet is fully independent — your child reads, analyzes, and writes without guidance, and you can see exactly what stuck.

How the Program Works

Each week ships with five worksheets that progress from guided practice to independent analysis, plus full answer keys with model responses for the open-ended questions. The passages themselves are written for serious readers — Roman aqueducts, the Scientific Revolution, the ethics of biotechnology — at the level of difficulty classical educators have always considered appropriate for the logic stage. Common Core RI.6 standards are addressed throughout, but the pedagogy is older and the goals are larger.