Literacy is central to our teaching at Cherokee Classical Academy. We equip our students with the knowledge to become great readers and writers, and we use a systematic phonics program to teach reading through spelling and writing.  

We teach students to read by:

• Presenting a thorough, explicit, multisensory explanation of the sound-symbol relationship for the spelling patterns of English (phonics)

• Teaching the rules and consistencies that govern the use of English words

Students hear a word, say the word, write the word, and read the word all while discussing the rules behind each spelling pattern. 

In Kindergarten, our students begin learning the sounds of the 72 phonograms and various spelling rules that make up our English language. Each grade progresses with this knowledge as students learn more difficult words. In fourth through sixth grades, students learn the Greek and Latin morphology behind their vocabulary words.

Students write every day. Starting in Kindergarten, students begin writing sentences that are dictated by their teacher and begin writing original sentences by the end of the year. By sixth grade, students are ready for advanced composition as they have progressed from the basics into more sophisticated writing through their journey in lower school. 

Finally, through the learning of word recognition (phonological awareness, decoding, spelling rules) and language comprehension (vocabulary, language structure, verbal reasoning, background, and literacy knowledge), students are equipped to read great books. Starting from second grade, each grade reads four to six books together each year, and our teachers lead enriching and thoughtful discussions of these books during class. We want to fill the minds of our students with rich ideas, and reading great literature enriches students’ experience of the world.

“Mathematics is the art of explanation. If you deny students the opportunity to engage in this activity – to pose their own problems, make their own conjectures and discoveries, to be wrong, to be creatively frustrated, to have an inspiration, and to cobble together their own explanations and proofs – you deny the mathematics itself.” – Paul Lockhart

CCA uses a Singapore Math approach to Mathematics. We use this approach because it aligns with our classical pedagogy of asking good questions to help students uncover the beauty and wonder of organizing and connecting different numbers, shapes, and ideas.

We approach math by moving from the concrete to pictorial to abstract, making the same progression and helping students think their way through increasingly difficult problems.  We can pose challenging problems to students because we allow them to work with the building blocks before working with the big picture.

Students are learning fewer skills and concepts explicitly but instead use the skills and concepts together and throughout larger topics.  Each year, students at all grades spend time on topics like place value, adding & subtracting, multiplying & dividing, mental math, and bar models.  But in each grade, these topics progress to more difficult skills and concepts. Students will compare the concrete and pictorial representations of these concepts with the abstract and see if the connections remain true. A Singapore Math approach presents students with difficult problems, giving them the opportunity to uncover how what they already know connects to new discoveries.  

Through this process of concrete to pictorial to abstract and the spiraling of the same fundamental topics with changes to skills, our students gain confidence in explaining their thoughts and ideas, increase automaticity in mental math, and are well grounded for higher-level abstract math classes in secondary school.

Cherokee Classical Academy is a small school by design.

There will be four classes of kindergarten and first grade, three classes each in second through fifth grades, and four classes in sixth grade. Class sizes will be as follows: 18 students in K-1st grade, 24 in 2nd-5th grade, and 22 in 6th grade.

We have one full-time teacher per classroom. We also have several assistant teachers that support our classes, literacy and math specialists that provide enrichment in the classrooms, in small groups, and one-on-one with students, and additional teachers for art, music, foreign language, and physical education.

Sixth Grade will be a transition year at Cherokee Classical. Students become the leaders of the lower school and the school day changes slightly from what students have experienced in grades K-5.

• Students receive a locker for storage 

• Teachers work on executive functioning and organization to help shepherd students through these changes.

• Students attend two “specials” classes per day (Music, Art, PE)

• Students remain with the same group throughout the day but socialize with the remainder of the grade during PE, recess, and lunch.