Students in grades 5 through 8 are now working on the Daughters of the American Revolution essay contest, which requires research and a bibliography.  The topic is the building of the Transcontinental Railroad; students are asked to “[d]escribe how you felt on May 10, 1869 when the golden spike was driven at Promontory Summit, Utah, to celebrate the completion of the first Transcontinental Railroad.  Pretend you are either a settler planning to use the train to travel to your new home in the West, an Irish or Chinese worker who helped build the line or a Native American whose way of life was greatly affected by the railroad.”  Go TAA scholars!

Monday afternoon 11/16 from 4-5 PM our students in grades 7+ will have a special FPRI opportunity that was just added to the FPRI schedule.  The subject is “Munich 1938: New Revelations from the Czech Archives,” relative to the famous Munich Agreement which permitted Hitler’s takeover of the Sudetenland portion of Czechoslovakia prior to WW II.

The speaker, Milan Hauner, is an associate scholar of FPRI who grew up in Prague and has earned two PhDs at prestigious European universities and who taught at other important institutions.  Hauner has written and co-edited ten books and many scholarly articles and has most recently edited several unpublished manuscripts of the former Czechoslovak president Edvard Benes, as well as reconstructing 3 volumes of this leader’s wartime memoirs.

The lecture will be held at the FPRI library/offices at 1528 Walnut, a smaller venue around the corner from the Union League.  TAA students who are interested in attending should notify Mrs. Anthony; we will need to make reservations.

On Tuesday, May 7, several of TAA’s elementary students traveled to Beaumont retirement community in Bryn Mawr, PA, to perform Scottish dances for the residents. Our dancers performed the Fling, the Sword, and the Lilt. Mrs. Susan Null has been teaching these girls the art of this particular dance genre in a Scottish Dancing Club after school on Tuesdays all school year.  The club grows more every year, and Mrs. Null is always eager to teach anyone new. All students participated in making Mother’s Day cards to take to Beaumont and give to the ladies that were watching the show.

Before the performance, the dancers performed the Fling, Sword, and Lilt for members and staff of Antioch Presbyterian Church, who so graciously host our school. After the Scottish dancers came off the stage, other students gave Mother’s Day cards to the audience.

Special thanks to Mrs. Null for all her hard work, and for her dedication to the Scottish Dance Club!

The Bulletin, a Philadelphia newspaper, published an op-ed piece by Mrs. Lee K. Anthony in today’s edition.  She asks:

Can our children be expected to serve two masters, i.e. pervasive indoctrination in postmodern relativism in the secular schools and a Judeo-Christian heritage necessary to continue our unique American heritage of liberty and representative republican democracy?  Lincoln, quoting the Bible, said that a “house divided cannot stand.”  There are serious consequences to our neglect of K-12 education, and I hope I have convinced you that we cannot leave that task to the state or to “values-neutral” secular schools.

Mrs. Anthony is the Founder and Head of Academy at TAA.

As announced on WFIL 560 Christian radio, The American Academy will be holding an open house for interested parents and their children on April 18th at 10AM in Villanova, PA (not at the school location in Conshohocken).  This is a great time to meet the faculty, staff, students, and board of the school in an informal setting.

Please contact us at 610-864-6288 for more information and directions.

We’re proud of our students’ artwork submissions to the Philadelphia Classical Society contest, pictured below.

Congratulations to the following TAA students who won “Top Ten” honors from Creative Communication’s Essay Contest:

• Laura Null “Winning and Losing,”
• Sarah Null “Growing in Spirit,”
• Ace Robinson “Happy Changes,” and
• Elena Sutton “Visiting and Traveling East and West.”

• Mr. Pat Devine, former TAA Board member, now an army chaplain, deployed on December 4.  Prayers are welcome! Our school has adopted an additional military man, Lt JG Garrett Moore, who is a Navy SEAL in California. Our other military adoptees are: Lt JG Matthew Anthony, deployed in early December to the Arabian Gulf, LCpl Jonathan Guelzo, Marines, and Cpl James Chun, Marines, and member of Antioch Presbyterian Church.
• Older students started a unit on Greek pottery in ceramics in early December at the Whitemarsh Community Art Center. We will study Greek pottery and produce our own, which shall be entered in the Philadelphia Classical Society Art competition in February.
• Special thanks to Mr. Tom Anderson for an enlightening discussion on John Milton’s Paradise Lost.  We celebrated Milton’s 400th birthday with a special birthday cake and a pencil with the Milton quote, “What is dark in me, illumine.” (We trust that students know that Milton also wrote Paradise Regained.)
• The final installment in the fall FPRI lecture series on the Middle East was Thursday, December 11, at the Union League.  The lecture was “U.S. Policy Toward the Middle East,” by one of our favorite speakers, Dr. Harvey Sicherman, President, Foreign Policy Research Institute. Mrs. Chagan prepared her world affairs student over the last several weeks on this important and timely subject.

The American Academy now accepts donations online via Click and Pledge.  If you wish to make a donation online, or even via mail, please visit our donations page.