Third Form - Core Courses/Departmental Offerings

The following courses are offered as Core Academic Courses for the Third Form. All Third Form students take these courses. To view additional departmental course offerings please click here.

English I

English I, a core curriculum course in the Third Form, reflects the goals and topics of the form’s theme – A Sense of Place: Community and Belonging. The focus is on the development of reading skills, comprehension, studying vocabulary in context, improving grammar skills, and developing sentence and paragraph writing techniques.

Third Form students learn methods for analyzing readings and identifying literary devices such as setting and figures of speech. Students develop and look for connections between texts in the core program. Students also start developing their individual writing styles through memoirs, persuasive speeches, creative writing prompts, and analytical assignments. The reading list includes The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Animal Farm, A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Watsons Go to Birmingham, and Who Do You Think You Are? Stories of Friends and Enemies, along with other selected short stories and poems.

History I

History I introduces Third Form students to the study of history using a cultural model approach. This is in keeping with the overall theme of the Third Form, A Sense of Place: Community and Belonging. History I students are taught to analyze cultures, both past and present, using a frame of reference that considers family, government, religion, economy and education. History I students begin their study of culture by learning to apply the cultural model to their own school community. From there, the class works backwards in time. At the conclusion of this course, the students should be very familiar with a cultural model approach to the study of history, with specific applications to the cultural history of Egypt, Greece, Rome and the Early Middle Ages.

Environmental Science

This course makes use of the South Kent campus resources extensively and also includes a number of field trips off campus. Students are briefly exposed to geology, oceanography, ecology, meteorology, astronomy, anthropology and archaeology. Laboratories from each of these sciences are integral parts of the course. The key skills stressed are measurement, the scientific method, and text skills.