Understanding the CATN Core Curriculum

The Classes at Town North have been developed to complement one another as students progress from seventh through twelfth grades. The core curriculum of history, literature, and writing, which is based primarily on Sonlight Curriculum, is designed to develop critical thinking and communication skills, while exposing students to a wide variety of worldviews and grounding them in the Christian faith.

History, literature and writing are intertwined within the CATN core curriculum. History shares lessons from the past teaching students to analyze not just the facts, but also the decisions and worldviews behind them. Literature connects students with history on a deeper and more personal level through the great writers and thinkers of each age, whose works reflect the human condition. Finally, writing teaches students to effectively communicate their own ideas and responses to the ideas they have interacted with in history and literature.

The CATN core curriculum, which also includes science and math, as a whole gradually moves students from the fact-gathering grammar phase, to the relationship-drawing logic phase, and finally to the worldview evaluating and judging phase of rhetoric. The result of this curriculum over the past eleven years has been graduates with strongly developed critical thinking and communication skills who are able to interact effectively with the world while standing firmly on the foundation of God.