7th Grade Humanities

7th Grade Introduction to Humanities

This course will be broken down into 3 large segments focusing on:

A principal point of this course will be to teach students to write and interpret written prose, poetry, and academic articles well.  

The Elements of Style provides a good set of guidelines for reference.

Students will study the the art of story telling and english composition (in the most general sense of the word) through both classical and modern literature as well as multimedia (videos, audio recordings, music, art, etc.) appropraite to the 7th-grade level.  They will gain an understanding of how the complex web of culture gives rise to scientific breakthroughs, religious and philosophical discourse, and artistic developments.

Students will have roughly 5-10 pages of assigned reading every day amounting to 2000-3000 pages of high quality literature and nonfiction reading in their first year.  They will engage with the reading assignments via writing exercises and class discussion.  We will try to be as transparent as possible with what they will be reading and looking at.  We feel it’s important that parents participate in this discussion and help contextualize things for their children.  

Additionally, students will be exposed to great works of art such as sculpture, paintings, film, music, and even video games that will thematically complement the written material. It will not be reasonable to generate a complete list of this material (especially as new great works are being generated all the time!), but we will try to keep a modestly updated list here.