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THE WELCOME PACKET
Once we receive fees and registration,
we mail you our Welcome Packet that includes a student skills
assessment for each of your students. This is a set of informal
tests addressing reading, grammar, composition and math, and we advise
you to take two or three days at your kitchen table at an easy pace to
complete them.
In addition to the assessments our
Welcome Packet includes:
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An application for enrollment with the
Home School Legal Defense Association for your review
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A transfer of student
records request to send to your student's previous school
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A return envelope addressed to St.
Thomas Aquinas Academy for the completed assessments
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ASSESSMENT EVALUATION
 Our
program is not a one-size-fits-all program. Your curriculum planning
advisor reviews the assessments looking for academic strengths and
weaknesses and learning styles to place each of your students in the
appropriate levels and types of materials. The assessment process can
take as little as three weeks if the assessments are completed and
returned within the week you receive them. The later in the homeschool
high season (April to August), the longer it can take. The sooner
you send the assessments in to the Academy, the sooner your advisor
can get started with setting up your personalized curriculum plan!
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THE PROGRAM PACKET
 1)
When we receive your completed assessments, we sketch out written
remarks about each child’s academic strengths and weaknesses and basic
learning style and make recommendations for starting points in subject
areas.
2) Included in this mailing we will also send our STAA Handbook which
includes recommendations for organizing your year, records and
daily routines. It is also accompanied by curriculum guides for each of your
students with personalized recommendations. The
curriculum guides suggest what books to use, why to use them, how to
use them, how often and how long. Detailed course plans for many of
the subjects and/or texts are attached. Read through the guides in
their entirety before your Course of Study Planning Appointment and jot down any
questions you may have for your advisor.
3)
With the assessment evaluations in hand, we recommend completing the "Before You
Begin Homeschooling" section of the STAA Handbook to help you start focusing in on academic goals for
each child in general and the coming year in particular. After you
have completed the exercises in the "Before You Begin Homeschooling"
section, call to set up your Course of Study Planning appointment with your advisor.
4) If you enroll in our Report Card & Transcripts Option we will
send an expanded version of our STAA Handbook that includes
information and forms about submitting grades and progress to earn
semester report cards, transcripts and diplomas from St. Thomas
Aquinas Academy.
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OUR COURSE PLANS
The books and resources to obtain and how to use
them are detailed for the family in each student's
curriculum guide.
Materials recommended are suitable to the home
school; both the student and the teaching-parent
will find them easy to use. Many texts have unit
quizzes, and answer keys, too. Where texts do not
include their own pace and plan of study, we have
added weekly course plans.
After evaluating the student's
assessment your academic advisor will put together a personalized
curriculum guide for the student that includes course notes, pacing
suggestions, weekly lesson
plans, and book ordering information for each course that is
recommended for the student's skill level.
Following are the Academy's various course
classifications:
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Grammar School (GS) - Courses
designed for students in grades Pre-1st through 8th.
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General Education (GE) - Courses
intended for non-academic, remedial, or concrete learners.
The General Education course type is assigned to courses that
qualify as basic high school skills. These are not necessarily
college-preparatory courses, but they can draw high school
credits while the student is working on developing or
remediating key college-prep skill areas. Non-academic courses
like Physical Education are GE. All Non-STAA Courses (NSC) are
assigned GE course credits.
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College Preparatory (CP) - Courses designed to equip the student to step into the college
classroom. The College Preparatory course type is assigned
to courses that are more textbook- or workbook-based. While
strong reading and high school writing skills are required for
CP courses, the work often is more focused on comprehension
rather than developing reasoning skills as in the coursework in
LA courses. While Science, Math, and Languages are an important
part to a comprehensive Catholic, Liberal Arts education, they
are typically classified as CP courses because they do not
contain enough classical works to qualify as LA courses.
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Liberal Arts (LA) - Courses that
introduce the students to the classics and focus on analytical
thinking, reading, and writing. These courses in the
Liberal Arts introduce the students to the great writers,
thinkers, saints, and Church Doctors that have contributed
throughout the ages to making Catholic culture so rich. The
students will be reading the source texts and, through oral
discussion in the home and assigned writing, will offer their
own responses to the authors. LA courses require strong reading and writing skills.
These courses are a step above the College Preparatory
classification of courses in educational quality as they
are decidedly not textbook- or workbook-based approaches
to the information and development of strong thinking and
writing skills. These courses do not require prior
experience with the material on the part of the teaching-parent
and are designed exclusively for the homeschool environment.
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Non-STAA Courses (NSC) /
Substitutions - Course plans
are not provided for Non-STAA Courses. However, St. Thomas
Aquinas Academy will gladly accept properly reported NSC courses
as part of the student’s academic plan. As stated in the
High School Diploma Requirements,
over 50% of a student’s academic credits in each year of high
school must be from St. Thomas Aquinas Academy courses. Dramatic
departure from the STAA core plan tends to compromise the
cohesiveness of the program and may leave holes in the
development of certain college-preparatory skills. Please
discuss any planned swapping of STAA courses for NSC courses
with your academic planning advisor to verify that your plan
will still keep your student on track for graduation.
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CURRICULUM
PLANNING
Your advisor will review each of your student's assessment results
with you, and then work with you to personalize our program to your
family, then to each of your students. We will move skill levels up or
down per subject; organize the whole family into the same science,
history and religion cycles; combine students into the same or
compatible texts; help you find central focuses for each of the
students in each of the subjects according to their academic needs and
styles; make recommendations and comments on alternative choices; etc.
Our advisors are experienced homeschoolers and subscribe to the ideas
and methods found in such books as Susan Schaeffer MacAulay’s For the
Children’s Sake, Dorothy and Raymond Moore’s Home Grown Kids and
The
Successful Homeschool Handbook, and Laura Berquist’s Designing Your
Own Classical Curriculum. After you receive the assessment
evaluation and curriculum guides from your advisor, call to schedule a
telephone Course of Study Planning Appointment with your
advisor.
During the Course of Study Planning
Appointment your advisor will discuss with you:
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the assessment test results
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the recommended courses for your students
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how to layout your homeschooling week
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how to grade your student's work
If you enrolled in our Report Card
& Transcripts Option, we will also schedule a short, second
appointment to discuss:
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how to report for report cards
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various other points such as standardized testing, high school credit
tracking, transcripts, & diplomas
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answer any other questions you may have
about developing school records.
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ORDERING BOOKS
After the phone
appointment with your advisor, you will be ready to order your books.
In our curriculum guides we list the easiest to use
source for each book or program, its price and order code. Books take
two to eight weeks to arrive, depending on the time of year
and—voila!—you are ready to school, with confidence and competence--or
at the least with a firm starting point, a clear set of goals and a
friend to help you along the way!
Books can cost as little as $150 for one child and as much as the
moon, depending on your family’s interests and income. We recommend a
beginning budget of $300 per student for the smaller family, and less
per student for the larger family.
We strongly advise our families wait to order books until after the
curriculum planning appointment so you can be sure to get the
appropriate levels. This is especially important since St. Thomas
Aquinas Academy is not a one-size-fits-all program. Your advisor will
help tailor our program to meet your family's specific academic needs,
not just assign a grade level and ISBN numbers to match. It'll be
worth the wait!
The main books for each grade level are listed on our website. Please
feel free to click through to the catalogue providers and order
catalogues, or preview their comments regarding the materials on-line.
Too, you might watch for a homeschool conference in your area; most of
our books are mainstream homeschooling material, easily available and
widely used, and are displayed at most larger homeschool conventions.
Do keep in mind that the summer and early fall months are "crunch"
time for homeschool and book suppliers so the earlier you get started
on your ordering the more likely you will be to have all of your books
ready for the beginning of the school year. We would encourage our
families who are anxious to get started to pick up the The Paideia
Program: An Educational Syllabus by Mortimer Adler and order, buy, or
borrow from the library some of the books on Mr. Adler's lists. Spend
time reading aloud to and/or with your children, discussing the
stories, virtues the characters may or may not be displaying, and
drawing pictures of the characters and action.
Here are some of our favorite suppliers that we refer you to:
Rainbow Re-Source Center
RT 1 Box 159A, 50 N 500 East RD, Toulon, IL 61483
1-888-841-3456
Emmanuel Books
POB 321, New Castle, DE 19720
1-800-871-5598
Our Father's House
5530 S Orcas ST, Seattle, WA 98118
(206) 725-0461
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GRADING STUDENT WORK
Grading is an art rather than a science, especially in the home school
where we do not have the luxury of grading “on the curve.” Our
programming gives clear instructions on how to start developing your
own grading style with regard to your student’s aptitudes, but
content, work load and grading is left firmly in the hands of the
parents.
Most of our materials include answer keys and/or grading instructions.
Additionally, our program packet outlines a variety of grading methods
to motivate students to greater accuracy and accomplishment.
When it comes to grading student compositions the materials we use
were chosen because they clearly state the assigned objectives for
writing, making the work much easier to accomplish, making the grading
much easier to do. Also, many of our materials have specific
evaluation tools and methods included, and we include a number of
recommendations and options for evaluating written work too. And
always, your advisor is available to work through these kinds of
questions during regular office hours or by appointment.
If you enrolled in the Report Cards &
Transcripts Option, we do “eyeball” quarterly work samples and standardized testing as
they come in and contact the family when we see obvious difficulties,
i.e. student achievement is too low to merit the grades given, Mom is
too demanding, the level of mastery is set too low or too high for the
student, etc. And our families are always welcome to call for feedback
regarding a student’s quarterly reporting, as they feel the need.
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SEMESTER REPORTING
Semester Reporting is not mandatory for STAA families. Indeed we even
offer suggestions as to how to keep your school years well documented
without semester reporting. But to qualify for transcripts, reports
cards, and diplomas issued by STAA semester reporting is required.
We provide you with a handy form to summarize your courses, hours
spent, grades and progress, and then ask for a student work sample to
support each grade petitioned for. There is bit more to it, but it is
all explained in detail and you, the teaching-parent,
will be well prepared for it by the time you are ready to send in your
reporting packets. And that goes for tracking high school credits. As
daunting as such tasks seem, with our experienced advice you will be a
pro at such tasks in no time!
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CONTINUING SUPPORT
We do not just send you packets, talk with you once, and leave you by
your lonesome for the rest of the year. We have support staff available Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday by phone or e-mail to
help you with the little questions. If your call will require longer
than ten minutes or your advisor’s familiarity with your family and
curriculum plan, we will set up an appointment to speak to you at
length regarding your concerns. Remember, we want to hear from our
families. Your homeschooling success is important to us!
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