Emily Co.

*Under Construction- More Details to Come*

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The Focus of Phase Four

Phase Four of the Emily Co. curriculum is designed (theoretically) for children age 10, 11, and 12, but it’s open to all who have completed the previous phases. Typically during this stage of child development we’re focused on exploration and connecting concepts.

The first year of Discovery is spent sampling as many new hobbies and activities as possible to identify what the child’s new passions and pastimes might be now that they have the academic and personal basics down. The best of every potential passion is provided to them and the focus is to determine if they’re spending as much time as they can doing what brings them joy.

The second year of Discovery is spent mastering the beginner and intermediate level skills in the hobbies they identified as their favorites and integrating these topics into their lifestyle goals.

With the format accommodating developmental and psychological variance, the below courses bring this vision into being.

Phase Four Coursework

Physical and Psychological Bonds: this course will cover biological, physical, kinetic, neurological, and sociological principles that can be applied to nutrition and team athletics. Students will be required to sample a team sport this year to apply what they’re learning. They will be allowed to choose whichever sport they are most interested in.

Portraiture, Perspective, and Personality: this course applies artistic composition skills and modern personality psychology as students create portraits of living beings, interview people they’d like to learn about, curate a personal aesthetic and brand for themselves, and survey famous studies informing our understanding of differences among human beings, serving as an introduction to abnormal psychology and developmental disabilities as well.

Arts Empowered by Technology: this will be a survey of famous photographs, cinematic masterpieces, viral online videos, modern music, groundbreaking animated series, and gorgeously engineered video games. We will be building on the foundational skills needed to engage with and analyze these works. For their major projects/assignments, they will create their own photography portfolio and their own short film with an original soundtrack.

Multiverse Explorations: this course is an overview of the frontier of the natural sciences. (The natural sciences include astronomy, physics, chemistry, Earth science, and biology.) We will be building an understanding of the scientific method, keeping a record of scientific observations, and designing our own experiments. The course will focus on analyzing the world around us and will also introduce the difference between scientific fact and fiction. For major projects/assignments, the students will keep records of the sun and moon, they will keep notes on the weather with attention to the water cycle and preserving key environments, they will study the habitat of a favorite animal, they will stargaze and learn to use a telescope, Roman and Greek mythology integrated, they will observe for themselves the basic laws of time and space, and they will be introduced to the microscope, telescope, and other essential tools for scientific discovery.

Novels and Poetry for Lost Souls: this course is comprised of a compilation of classic childrens’ literature at its most creative. We’ll be learning how to enjoy and analyze this work by building a rewarding reading habit and breaking stories and poems down to their fundamental components. They will learn how to summarize a fictional or poetic work in a report, they will create fan art and fan fiction, they will write reviews expressing what they thought about the work, and they will be telling their own stories and keeping a poetry section in their journal.

Mathematics for Arts and Trades: this course is an introduction to geometry and trigonometry, with their applications for drawing, painting, design, architecture, civil engineering, construction trades, and more. All the math problems they solve will be applied to their art or something they are building themselves.

Gaming and Puzzle Solving: this course will cover the history of the gaming industry, the psychological explanation of why games are so fun, famous arcade and console classics, chess, puzzles like Sudoku and the Rubik cube, how to solve other puzzles of logic, pattern recognition, and more. The goals of this course are to learn how to select high quality games to play, to practice problem solving, teamwork, leadership skills, pattern recognition, and to build strategy skills. Students will be playing Dungeons and Dragons and improving their understanding of programming as well.