Classical Academic Press has partnered with The Ambrose School of Boise, Idaho, to provide you with this valuable resource that can be used and adapted for schools, co-ops, and homeschools. The Ambrose Curriculum Guide represents the fruit of more than 10 years of planning, teaching, assessment, collaboration, writing, revising, and rewriting. There is no other guide that we know of that contains such ongoing thought, clarity, detail, and accumulated wisdom. With 262 total documents for grades K–12, this guide is a remarkable help to any teacher or administrator as you engage in curriculum decisions and lesson planning.

The Ambrose Curriculum Guide is composed of a variety of documents that cover every grade and subject and includes a curriculum roadmap, course lead sheets, course scope and sequences, rubrics, and 132 separate literature teaching guides for upper school teachers. Divided into two major parts, Lower School and Upper School, this ultimate resource of suggested texts, teaching goals and methods, suggested schedules, and more will give you an incredible head start as you prepare for a new academic year. You can use the Ambrose Curriculum Guide as a tool to plan a start-up school, to provide guidelines for a co-op, to design a grade level for a homeschool student, and much more. This versatile guide can meet the needs of any educator!

View an overview of the Ambrose Curriculum Guide in the tabs above, or explore the documents below. In the K–6 grade range, documents have been grouped by grade, with the exception of music, art, speech, and physical education, which have been grouped by subject. In the 7–12 grade range, documents have been arranged by subject. Note that within the 7–12 Letters folder, the documents have been further sorted by grade, as documents specific to each text studied in each grade are provided.

Please note that these documents are read-only files with a ClassicalU subscription. You also may purchase downloadable versions here from Classical Academic Press.

CAP Audio Room: Interview with Dr. Christopher Perrin on curriculum guides and planning

Ambrose Curriculum Guide Welcome Letter (PDF)

Ambrose Curriculum Guide Overview (PDF) 
The overview document in the next tab takes viewers through the Ambrose School “Curriculum Tree,” which contains the following elements:

• Vision Statement
• Curriculum Roadmap
• Course Lead Sheets
• Gold Sheet Source Docs (called “Source Works Teacher’s Guides” on the documents themselves)
• Course Syllabus*
• Lesson Plans*
• Rubrics (described with sample images at the bottom of the “Overview of the Guide”)

The Ambrose curriculum is distinct in that The Ambrose School depends on original sources: the writings of men such as Socrates, Augustine, Herodotus, Boethius, Pascal, etc. (Ad Fontes). This minimizes the use of textbooks or packaged curricula to teach students so that whenever possible, students learn from original source documents. However, in order to ensure that their K–12 objectives are met, The Ambrose School provides this curriculum guide to help teachers accomplish educational objectives through the use of these source materials. Educators aim to meet the objectives listed on the lead sheets for each course they teach, and the objectives listed on the source sheets for each individual work they teach as part of the Upper School Letters courses.

*Please note: The syllabus for each course is not included as it is created yearly by each teacher from the Course Lead Sheet. A lesson plan template is provided, but specific lesson plans are not supplied in this curriculum guide, as it is expected that these will be crafted by the teacher to suit his or her specific class context.

As described in the Overview of the Guide embedded below, the Ambrose Curriculum Guide contains:

• Curriculum Roadmap
• Course Lead Sheets
• Gold Sheet Source Documents (called “Source Works Teacher’s Guides” on the documents themselves)

Please also note that, as described this overview, the syllabi and lesson plans are created by teachers on a yearly and weekly basis (respectively), and the curriculum guide materials simply contain a template. This overview is where the the five common rubrics used to assess students are described.

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Since 1995, The Ambrose School’s goal has been consistent: to restore Christian intellectual leadership in our culture, both locally and nationally. The school has experienced consistent growth since it began with just three students, to its present size of around 500 students.

The Ambrose School is one of the veteran schools leading the renewal of classical education across the United States. The mission of The Ambrose School is “to mature students in Christ as we integrate faith and reason through classical Christian education.” They are dedicated to the idea that true education requires more than imparting knowledge, or training skills, or even teaching students to think (though all of these are involved). They are cultivating in students what the ancient Greeks and Christians called paideia. Paideia can be understood as the set of assumptions (worldview) a student has, and the rightly ordered affections (virtues) that drive what he or she is passionate about. Paideia motivates the decisions a person makes, and it turns faith into a powerful cultural force rather than a personal experience. A person’s paideia is the core ingredient in building a community that loves and honors God, and K–12 education is a foundational ingredient in forming paideia in a student. In Ephesians 6, God calls fathers to raise their children in the “paideia of the Lord.” Historically, Christian paideia has been cultivated through a unique form of education that was designed for this purpose: classical Christian education.