Welcome to the Ambrose Curriculum Guide!

The Ambrose School has taken almost ten years to carefully create and refine the documents that constitute their K–12 curriculum guide. The guide is composed of a variety of documents—including curriculum roadmaps, lead sheets, course syllabi, lesson plans, rubrics, and more—to help guide you in your curriculum planning.

The overview document in the next tab takes viewers through the Ambrose School “Curriculum Tree,” which contains the elements listed below. The Ambrose curriculum is supported by a hierarchy of documents, which sometimes appear in the lower left hand corner of a given page in the curriculum guide. These documents have been placed in the tree below:

Curriculum Tree / Curriculum Guide:

• Vision Statement
• Curriculum Roadmap
• Course Lead Sheet
• Course Syllabus
• Gold Sheet Source Docs.
• Lesson Plans
• Rubric

The Ambrose curriculum is distinct in that they depend on the original sources (Ad Fontes). This means they minimize the use of textbooks or packaged curricula to teach students. Whenever possible, they learn from source documents (the writings of men like Socrates, Augustine, Herodotus, Boethius, Pascal, etc.) However, in order to ensure that their K-12 objectives are met, they provide a guide that helps teachers accomplish educational objectives with source materials. Because great works are layered, it is a temptation for teachers to bring out the meaning THEY find most compelling in a work. This is not the design. They ask that teachers meet the objectives listed on the lead sheets for each course they teach, and the gold sheets for each individual work they teach in the Upper School Letters courses.

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The Ambrose School is one of the veteran schools leading the renewal of classical education across the United States. The Ambrose Curriculum Guide represents the fruit of over ten 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.

The mission of the Ambrose School: To mature students in Christ as we integrate faith and reason through classical Christian education. The Ambrose School is 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).  We 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. As a classical Christian school, we are quite different from other schools.  We strongly encourage you to investigate the classical Christian difference for yourself.  Schedule a visit to learn more about our vision to help you raise your child in the Paideia of the Lord.