"There is a point at which we really can't appreciate beauty unless we truly understand it."

That is how Mrs. Katy McKinney sums up the art program at Lafayette Classical Academy (LCA), and she brings in the teacher behind it to show what she means. Amy Coffelt found LCA after driving past a yard sign for a week straight. She came as a parent, stepped in as a kindergarten teacher, and now teaches art across the school.

When people hear "classical education," Mrs. McKinney says, they tend to think of literature and the humanities. Art rarely makes the list. But with the Hillsdale K–12 Program Guide which Lafayette follows, students are asked to study great works before they are asked to create their own. Mrs. Coffelt shows how that plays out across the trivium, from the elements of art in the early grades to original work in high school.

Then come the projects: this year's Veterans Day art, built grade by grade on Theodore Roosevelt's "Man in the Arena"; scratchboard animals that made middle schoolers reverse everything they knew about shading; first graders pressing marks into clay slabs like scribes in Mesopotamia. And a fourth grader whose Greek columns looked like he had ignored the directions entirely, until Mrs. McKinney found out why. "I ate humble pie that day," she says.

None of it is easy, and that is the point. These students are held to a high standard, and they keep at it because they have studied the masters and know what good work looks like. As Mrs. McKinney puts it, "Education, I think, finds its purpose in the loving of the beautiful."

Lafayette Classical Academy is a classical school pursuing excellence in academics and excellence in character, together. If this episode encouraged you, share it with a friend — because our nation is not renewed first in the courts or in the capitals, but in our classrooms, in our families, and in our children's hearts.

For more information about Lafayette Academy, A Classical School please visit https://lafayetteacademy.org/

For Referenced Resources from the LadyK Podcast Click Here for Download

"I don't want you to hide behind the screw."

That is what science teacher Mr. Kevin Miller tells his high school students, and it is the thread running through this conversation with Katy McKinney.

Mr. Miller came to Lafayette Classical Academy (LCA) from the field. He spent years as a wildlife biologist and aquatic entomologist, studying mayflies, before a phone call in the middle of an Illinois wildlife reserve brought him into the classroom. Now, as Mrs. McKinney puts it, he has lit "scientific fires all over the campus."

Mrs. McKinney, LCA's Founder and Head of School, asks Mr. Miller to walk through two programs: their middle school Rocket Program and their highschool Common Arts. In middle school physics, students learn Newton's laws by building rockets, and nothing launches until each student has wired a controller that can fire it safely. A retired Boeing engineer once watched the process and said it was exactly how his lab tested ejection seats. In the new high school Common Arts class, students build chairs with no screws at all, from honeysuckle they cut and hauled out of the woods themselves. And on a school camping trip, a bluff scattered with chert became a lesson nobody planned.

Mr. Miller makes the point that none of these lessons happen quickly, and that is the point. Students stay with a breadboard until the circuit works, log every launch, and keep bracing a chair until it stops rocking. The goal, Mr. Miller says, is to challenge the students enough “to where they're invested in it."

Both Mrs. McKinney and Mr. Miller push back on a world of instant answers, where, as Mr. Miller puts it, "it's really easy to just give up." Mrs. McKinney names the payoff: "incredible triumph and satisfaction," which no one reaches without "incredible determination, perseverance and dedication." Mr. Miller points out the same valuable lesson from an engineer when he and his family stood under a Saturn V in Huntsville, AL.

Lafayette Classical Academy is a classical school pursuing excellence in academics and excellence in character, together. If this episode encouraged you, share it with a friend — because our nation is not renewed first in the courts or in the capitals, but in our classrooms, in our families, and in our children's hearts.

For more information about Lafayette Academy, A Classical School please visit https://lafayetteacademy.org/

For Referenced Resources from the LadyK Podcast Click Here for Download

Textbooks lay the groundwork. But standing on the ground impacts a child like nothing else.

In this episode, Katy McKinney, Founder and Head of School at Lafayette Classical Academy (LCA), makes the case for the field trip — not as a break from learning, but as the moment learning becomes real. Drawing on years of travel with her own family as a homeschool mom and now with LCA students and their parents, Katy explains why history studied for weeks and then seen with your own eyes stays with a child for life, and why a well-prepared field trip does more than teach facts: it forms the affections and cultivates gratitude for those who came before.

Mrs. McKinney takes listeners along to the places that have shaped her students — Gettysburg, Mount Vernon, Williamsburg, Fort Necessity, Independence Hall, and Washington's Crossing — and shares the moments that stayed with her: reciting the Gettysburg Address at sunset in the very spot Lincoln delivered it, with taps playing and not a dry eye in the group; a fourth grader recognizing Lafayette's portrait at Mount Vernon because of the book she had read the night before; two young children whose jaws dropped in front of the Liberty Bell because they understood what it had cost to preserve it; and a summer afternoon on the banks of the Delaware, where Katy asked her kids to close their eyes and imagine Christmas night, 1776.

She closes with the words that were circulating among Washington's men that winter — Thomas Paine's The Crisis — and a reminder that the freedoms we enjoy were won at a particular spot, on a particular night, by people who did not know they were doing it for us.

Whether you homeschool, send your children to a classical school, or simply want them to love what is good and true, this episode offers a practical picture of how to bring history to life.

Lafayette Classical Academy is a classical school pursuing excellence in academics and excellence in character, together. If this episode encouraged you, share it with a friend — because our nation is not renewed first in the courts or in the capitals, but in our classrooms, in our families, and in our children's hearts.

For more information about Lafayette Academy, A Classical School please visit https://lafayetteacademy.org/

For Referenced Resources from the LadyK Podcast Click Here for Download