This is adapted from a talk that Mrs. Ackerman gave at a parent education event called Lightning Talks on September 28, 2022. Watch it here. On the front end I want to warn you that this talk may make kindergarten sound like a battlefield, but in this short time I don’t have time to go […]
Grit
Harvesting Where We Did Not Plant: The Story of a Brick-and-Mortar School
In the summer of 2017 on a sweltering weekday morning, I parked just south of the Capitol and walked to the Michigan Department of Education, holding the hands of my two toddlers, in order to get a letter of approval declaring us a school. I had tried and failed to register our school with the […]
Introduction to Latin
While reading Washington Irving’s book, The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., the 3rd and 4th graders came across the phrase terra incognita. A student asked what it means, but already knew half its meaning since he knew that terra, a vocabulary word they learned in their first year of Latin at Cedar, means “earth” or “land.” Why do we teach […]
Count the Cost, Part IV: Failure
Count the Cost is a blog series designed for prospective parents. In our fourth installment, we asked Miss Katherine Bradford about how a classical school’s high standards inevitably mean that students will deal with failure. (Spoiler Alert: We think that is a good thing.) Katie was a founding teacher at Oakdale Academy in Waterford Township […]
Training to Serve: Our Physical Education Curriculum
Human beings are composed of Mind, Soul, and Body. As a classical and Christian school, you are right to assume that we care about the mind and soul. But how many classical school graduates do you hear about in the NFL? Did we forget about the body? (The short answer is “no.”) The education of […]
From Great to Okay: What we’ve learned about distance learning
We at Cedar Classical Academy are confident that, right now, mid-pandemic, we continue to offer the best K-6 educational option in Lansing. Now beginning our ninth week of distance learning, we have kept our mission alive. Cedar Classical Academy’s culture has been marked since our founding by parental partnership, high standards, character emphasis, and real […]
“And they lived happily ever after”: Training kids’ moral imaginations to meet life’s demands and to demand more out of life
Clear thinking first requires imagination that is trained to expect things to make sense. Dragons get defeated, stories end happily ever after, 2 + 2 = 4, truth is objective — all of these ideas make sense to a well-trained imagination. If a person does not expect life to make sense (or, more crippling still, […]