Four courses that carry a student from the building blocks of poetry in sixth grade, through logic and classical rhetoric, to performing a poem of their own before an audience.
Grammar. The building blocks of poetry, learned the classical way, by imitation.
Logic. Reasoning well: terms, statements, valid arguments, fallacies and proofs.
Rhetoric. The art of eloquence: speaking the truth with power and grace.
Poetry. The English language in its most elevated form, read, written, and performed.
Before rhetoric, a student needs a stock of words to work with and a mind that reasons in a straight line.
Thirty lessons that teach the mechanics of poetry by the classical method of imitation, from scansion and rhyme to ten powerful tropes, with riddles to solve, tongue twisters, and a list of over 150 poems to read alongside. Developed and taught at Logos School by its principal, Matt Whitling.
Student Text · Teacher’s Edition · video lessons
Introductory Logic lays the foundation for reasoning from the truth of God: defining terms, judging the truth of statements, building valid arguments and spotting informal fallacies. Intermediate Logic adds truth tables, truth trees and formal proof, applied to arguments from the Bible to digital electronics.
Student Text · Teacher’s Edition · Exam Pack · video lessons
The art of eloquence in a spoken world.
A full year of classical rhetoric for high school. Students learn the theory of using words well, study the greatest speeches of all time, and practice the skills of effective oratory, and the year ends not with an exam but with a speech of their own.
“God speaks, and we mumble.”
Brian Daigle · from the Foreword
If we want to love our neighbor, hear and understand God’s Word and persuade the lost, the Foreword argues, “then studying rhetoric is not an option; it is not an elective. It is a necessity.”
“And while everybody uses words, believers, as people of the Word, should be especially deliberate in the study and practice of using words well.”
Daniel Foucachon · From the Introduction
“Like a young knight receiving his first sword, it is crucial to remember that words are powerful and dangerous.” So the course begins with a Christian view of rhetoric before it hands over a single tool.
“According to the great Roman orator Cicero, the threefold goal of rhetoric is to teach, to move, and to delight.” Fitting Words sets those three goals beside truth, goodness and beauty.
“Effectiveness in rhetoric can be measured against our ability to teach men the truth, to move men to goodness, and to delight men with beauty—that is, to persuade.” Lesson 1
The book teaches “through the three-fold method of theory, imitation, and practice”: the tools of classical rhetoric, the greatest orators using them, and students wielding them themselves.
The five faculties of oratory, invention, arrangement, style, memory and delivery, taught from Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian and Augustine and weighed against Scripture. Every lesson ends with questions for Thinking Deeper, suggestions for Reading Further, and a passage for Developing Memory.
Printed at the back of the book: Pericles’ Funeral Oration, Cicero against Catiline, St. Crispin’s Day, Luther at Worms, Edwards, Patrick Henry, the Declaration of Independence, Gettysburg, Roosevelt, Kennedy, King and Wiesel. Then a chart of every speech in the Bible, Genesis to Revelation.
An emotion speech, a forensic speech, a political speech (or St. Crispin’s Day from memory), a speech of praise, and a final persuasive speech of eight to twelve minutes. “The final evaluation for the course is not a comprehensive exam but a final speech.”
Statesmen, preachers, poets and saints, each drawn as a marble bust by George Harrell, with a line from one of their speeches. Choose one.
The four books for a year of rhetoric: the hardback textbook, the student workbook, the answer key and the exam pack.
Video lessons can be added to the set: streaming, DVD or Blu-ray.
Hardback. Thirty lessons, the twelve speeches, every speech in the Bible, and a glossary-index.Student Workbook$24
Exercises for every lesson, and judging sheets for practising each speech.Answer Key$22
Answers to every exercise and exam, with one-year and two-year schedules.Exam Pack$10
Nine review sheets, nine exams and the speech judging sheets, to copy for one family or one class.“If you want to climb the mount of classical rhetoric, this text will be the Virgil to your Dante.”
Fitting Words Review
“The greatest compliment I can give of this curriculum is that it could not get into my own children’s hands and heads fast enough.”
Fitting Words Review
A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO NOBILITY
The capstone of the sequence. Building on Fitting Words and Grammar of Poetry, Word Hoard teaches students to read, hear, write and perform poetry: English “in its most elevated forms,” wielded for truth, goodness and beauty. The poet Joffre Swait calls it “the natural fruit of my life’s work.”
“As you will soon learn, our words are our greatest treasures, our finest tools, and our most dangerous weapons.”
Word Hoard · Introduction
“You will read poems and you will write them. In the end, you will go out and perform.”
“Your final assignment is to read aloud, to perform, a new poem to an audience at a public venue.”
A coffee shop’s open mic, a writers’ group, an evening with the youth group: the course ends with each student performing a poem they have written themselves. The Teacher’s Guide puts it simply: “This should be something special.”
“…whether that performance be of a simple sonnet, or of some kind words to an old lady, or a kind sonnet to an old lady, or even an old sonnet to a kind lady.”
Word Hoard · Introduction
“Not a collection of Christian poetry, mind you, but a Christian collection of poetry.”
The textbook is a bootcamp; the anthology is meant “to turn poetry from an excursion into a lifestyle.” The poems run in order of the poet’s birth, each century opened by a short introduction, and the Teacher’s Guide sets anthology readings for every week of the year. “Heretics and atheists are included alongside Puritan pastors and Roman Catholic martyrs.”
Geoffrey Chaucer · William Dunbar · Walter Raleigh · Edmund Spenser · Philip Sidney · Mary Sidney Herbert · William Shakespeare · Chidiock Tichborne · John Donne · Robert Herrick · George Herbert · John Milton · Anne Bradstreet · Thomas Traherne · Edward Taylor · William Cowper · William Blake · William Wordsworth · Samuel Taylor Coleridge · John Keats · Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · Edgar Allan Poe · Alfred, Lord Tennyson · Matthew Arnold · George MacDonald · Emily Dickinson · Christina Rossetti · Lewis Carroll · Thomas Hardy · Gerard Manley Hopkins · A. E. Housman · Francis Thompson · Rudyard Kipling · W. B. Yeats · G. K. Chesterton · Robert Frost · Carl Sandburg · T. S. Eliot · Wilfred Owen · W. H. Auden · Dylan Thomas · John Gillespie Magee Jr. and 26 more.
“These are poems about love and death and the Church as a hippopotamus. Expect conversations.”
A full year (32 weeks, four days a week) with weekly anthology readings, or a single semester (16 weeks) focused on composition. Schedules for both are in the Teacher’s Guide.
