JUNIOR’S PROGRAM

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“And thou shalt teach them diligently…”

                                        Deuteronomy 6:7

 

We are a community of families that support each other in becoming excellent parent mentors, providing children and youth inspirational group learning and social opportunities, and strengthening faith in God founded on the principles taught by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 

 

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INSPIRING Junior’s Educational Philosophy...

We adhere to Oliver DeMille's "A Thomas Jefferson Education" as our foundational philosophy and use Charlotte Mason’s methodology for our classroom use. Working in partnership together, we are learning how to provide inspirational educational experiences that will reinforce key milestones found in Core and Love of Learning phases with the goal of having our children ready to engage in the scholar experience during their teen years. Our focus is on training and supporting parents in providing a rich learning environment at home. We use classic, living books and hands-on materials as the basis of our methods, infusing our lives with connections to the world, inspirational stories and ideas, cultural literacy and heroes to emulate.  

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INSPIRING Junior’s Program Focus…

• Beginning with the end in mind: A truly successful, meaningful Scholar Phase and becoming a principled, lifelong learner

• Preparing children for a successful life by deliberately encouraging core character attributes.

• Following a path through each phase to incrementally grow toward fully developed scholar skills and lifelong learning in children and adults 

• Ensuring exposure to a rich “feast” of educational opportunities.

• Creating a wholesome environment to support family values.

• Loving learning and loving reading

• Training parents in methodologies for the home, to ensure appropriate developmental and academic growth.

• Allow for flexibility in classes that focus on Developmental Phase, not Age

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A Peek at Our INSPIRING Week…

Our school day consists of a rich feast of educational topics. We want to help stimulate a wide range of interests in our children’s elementary years. While providing an educationally fun, socially interactive day for our children, the format, replete with activities and ideas, helps parents to learn and practice principles and skills that widen their repertoire, empowering them to be able to create a rich, at-home educational experience that can be tailored to their individual children.

To make learning stick, it’s important to remember that a child learns best through a combination of books and hands-on opportunities. With guided discovery, you introduce worthy things to your child—things like beautiful art, excellent music, the wonders of God’s creation outdoors—and spotlight a particular aspect of it, then encourage the child to look closely and discover for himself. Our class format leads you through this effective method step by step and helps you guide your child to form personal relations that make knowledge his very own.

 

During a typical school day at INSPIRE Family Academy, all Junior classes will have communal daily themes. The exposure of all the children to common ideas allow the family an opportunity to create a unity of shared experiences at school that can be explored further at home through connections, discussions and activities. In addition, the cross-sharing of ideas and classroom outcomes amongst each other, creates an ideal peer-mentor training experience between parents. Our three-year rotation of lessons and themes uses a spiral learning method that invites children to revisit familiar ideas from a more mature perspective, allowing for more depth and connection.

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We will...

Dive Into Riches:

"Education is a life."(Charlotte Mason) We see that to mean that education should apply to body, soul and spirit. The mind needs ideas of all kinds, so a child's curriculum should be varied and generous with many subjects included. We believe that childrens' minds are capable of digesting real knowledge, and of making their own connections with knowledge and experiences, so we provide a rich, generous “feast” of topics that expose children to many interesting, living ideas and concepts, including:

• Music Appreciation

  • Classical music is worth pursuing, even when obstacles intrude. Great music embodies man’s highest experiences, his deepest emotions, and his spiritual aspirations. It has been called the universal language. Classical music appeals to something more basic than conscious intellect. Not every student will become a virtuoso, but she can understand that beauty and enjoyment can be added to life by appreciating good music.

• Artist Study

  • A child’s education should furnish him with whole galleries of mental pictures, pictures by great artists old and new;––…–– in fact, every child should leave formal schooling with at least a couple of hundred pictures by great masters hanging permanently in the halls of his imagination, to say nothing of great buildings, sculpture, beauty of form and color in things he sees… At any rate he should go forth well furnished because imagination has the property of magical expansion, the more it holds the more it will hold. (Charlotte Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education )

• Poetry

  • Good poetry reaches the heart in a way few other words can. It’s amazing how deeply a well-crafted phrase from a thoughtful poem can shape our lives!  “Poetry is a criticism of life; so it is, both a criticism and an inspiration; and most of us carry in our minds tags of verse which shape our conduct more than we know” (Ourselves, Book 2, p. 10). We are doing our children a great service when we nourish their minds and equip their hearts with good poetry.

• Nature Study

  • Through nature study, the child is laying in a store, as it were, of images and ideas to access and make use of in his formal science lessons. There is great value in this practice. “There is no part of a child’s education more important than that he should lay, by his own observation, a wide basis of facts towards scientific knowledge in the future” (Home Education, p. 264).

• Character Traits

  • “Good habits are wonderful servants. Bad habits are tyrannical masters.” (Charlotte Mason) Habits have tremendous power in a person’s life, laying the foundation for learning and the path for future success. That’s why habit-training is an integral part of our program’s format. Good habits lead to good character.

• Memorization/Recitation

  • “It is a delightful thing to have the memory stored with beautiful, comforting, and inspiring passages, and we cannot tell when and how this manner of seed may spring up, grow, and bear fruit” (Home Education, p. 253).

 

Leap Into Literature:

Stories have a way of making themselves at home in your mind. You can mull over a good story for days, examining it from different angles and poking around in its word pictures for truth that feeds your mind and influences your life. Well-written books that make the subject come alive—that touch the emotions and fire the imagination—those are the books that will give your child the idea that knowledge is supremely attractive and that reading is delightful. Those are the types of books, both classic and modern, we carefully read and select for the children’s education. Great “living” books foster a love of learning.

• Fairy Tales

  • Fairy Tales provide the opportunity to face and conquer, in the abstract, the frightening badness of the world, before we are compelled to grapple with such badness in reality. They are the buffer between what is scary but won’t happen, and what is scary and very well could happen. They awaken our eyes to intangible but essential truths of life, and create an intimacy with the spiritual laws that govern the universe and the concept of good and evil. Children will learn of courage and that the good, small and meek are not necessarily helpless or cowardly. They will see that the courageous, righteous, generous, patient, the humble and the hardworking, all lived happily ever after! Because…heaven is not a fantasy.

• Myths 

  • The very oldest fairy tales from Greek, Roman and Norse memory. They are almost unmatched for beauty, wisdom, truth, and in making children love noble deeds, and trust in God to help them through it.. They tell of men who were brave, skillful and dared to do more than other men. They were those who helped their country, killed fierce beasts and evil men, drained swamps and founded towns. They were honored through the tales because they had left their country better than they found it. The stories are not all true, of course, but the meaning of them is true, and true forever, and that truth is: Do right, and God will help you.

• Aesop 

  • Aesop’s Fables have been accepted as the core of childhood reading and instruction since the time of Plato! Reading the fables of any culture broadens a student’s window of the world. Reading the fables of Aesop specifically, not only broadens an understanding of classical Greek culture, but also the many artistic works that reference them. In addition, the fables are by their very nature rich in lessons about life, humanity, and morality.

• Biographies of exemplary people

  • The importance of Hero-admiration lies in the contact we have with those who have made great contributions or who behaved with nobility. There we learn to admire all that was noble in them. Whatever is noble, true, and pure should be considered and appreciated, because it all comes from God. Hero-admiration alleviates conceit, motivates to more strenuous effort, enlarges our sympathies, and creates peace and joy. The admirable person may make us conscious of our frailties or inexperience, yet stimulate a desire in ourselves to become more like him. In so doing, we try to improve or reform ourselves. These accounts not only bring earlier times alive for us, but the examples set before us of devotion, ingenuity, generosity, endurance, courage, industriousness, patriotism, repentance, and selflessness convince us that these virtues are attainable.

• Shakespeare

  • The plays of William Shakespeare are a secret resource for instructing a child’s conscience with ideas of goodness, pity, generosity, courage, and real love. In the lines of his plays, he metes out morsels of proverbs that can be understood by those focused on living the Christian life, who recognizes his own weaknesses and need for forgiveness. We can trace hundreds of passages back to biblical passages and thought. Shakespeare observed man as he is, and from a moral perspective. His were not success stories, but rather stories that displayed human weakness. He makes us hate sin but pity the sinner. His characters were the victims of their own choices. Reading the plays, especially the comedies, is a delightful, secret plan to train our children to become morally discerning.

 

It is important to note that the preparation for each day’s activities will largely be pre-done and in a binder for the parent-mentor. Instead of spending all your preparation time creating content for the week, we provide an opportunity for parents to spend that time training in the techniques, skills and principles through practice with our content. The goal is that the skills you learn and practice at school will aid you in mentoring your own homeschooling adventure.

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