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Have you heard of SchoolhouseTeachers.com? It offers over 400 self-paced courses and many resources for families from preschool all the way to adults for one low price. Membership includes access to all of the SchoolhouseTeachers.com courses, World Book Online resources, RightNow Media videos, The Old Schoolhouse Magazine, and much more.
If you have read some of my previous posts, you may know that I have created three courses for SchoolhouseTeachers.com over the past year. Foods and Food Production and Who are Community Helpers? were published on SchoolhouseTeachers.com last year. And earlier this year, the Weekly Writing Challenge course was published.
Last year was the first year I became a member of SchoolhouseTeachers.com, and I am so grateful for all of the resources they offer. There are so many course options available for children to choose from to accommodate their own unique interests.
My 12- year-old daughter who did all of the illustrations for Aah! Blown Away, Crash! An Alphabet Misadventure is interested in writing and graphic design, so she chose to take courses this past year that reflected those interests.
(As a side note, I am very proud of her for what she was able to accomplish with the illustrations in Aah! Blown Away, Crash! It’s amazing how quickly she learned how to use Affinity Designer to create all of them. Definitely not a skill I have!)
Anyways, as I was saying, she chose to take courses on SchoolhouseTeachers.com aimed at writing and graphic design. So, here are the courses she took along with a description in her own words of each of them.
Writing and Graphic Design Courses
Creating Dynamic Characters
This course is a good choice for those who aren’t sure how to form their characters and want to make them a dynamic aspect of their stories. This course, which is a section of the book Release the Novel in You: The Go to Fiction Writing Book for Teen Authors also by Gina Conroy, is split into three individual lessons with three days each. Use this course to create your own dynamic characters!
Exploring Creative Writing
This course is great for kids who want to learn more writing techniques and find inspiration. It kept me motivated to write, and encouraged me to keep up the good work every day. In this course, students will read about adjectives, showing instead of telling, alliteration, assonance, consonance, personification, anthropomorphism, metaphor, simile, emphasis, exaggeration, hyperbole, repetition, and contrast. My overall rating: I really liked this course!
Into the Elements
This is a great course for writers and writers-to-be. It was supposed to be four weeks long with three days per week; however, I watched each video in at least two separate days. One important thing to mention is that the course is a recorded writers’ conference with Donald Miller, and the videos are only on RightNow Media (which you can access with a free account through a SchoolhouseTeachers.com subscription). The course expanded on the conference with a downloadable and printable worksheet with answers. After the worksheet and a session in the conference, there was a writing exercise. Over all, this was probably one of my favorite writing courses.
My note: I thought it was funny that she added how RightNow Media is available through SchoolhouseTeachers.com in her description.
Paint With Your Words
P.A.I.N.T. With Your Words teaches young writers what passive and active writing are, how to use your five senses when writing, why you should choose descriptive nouns, verbs, and adjectives to liven up your stories, and how to use figurative language all in eight lessons, each divided into three days. This course is all about writing in more descriptive and colorful ways.
Writing Advertising Copy
This course is divided into three lessons with three days for each lesson. The class teaches what anthropomorphism is, how to compare and contrast, and some things about adjectives, adverbs, and advertising. It is a good course for people who want to be in the advertising business.
Introduction to Graphic Design
This is a wonderful course if you don’t know a lot about graphic design but are hungry to learn more. Spread out over seventeen lessons with two days per week, this course teaches what graphic design is, some copyright laws, what the elements of design are, how to properly use or understand fonts, colors, your audience, the message you want to covey, and some basic technique to use when designing on Canva, PicMoneky, and GIMP. From there, start designing logos, flyers, postcards, ads, brochures, t-shirts, book covers, product labels, and posters. Finally, design a brand for a made-up Christian dog food company. This course does require a lot of ink if you wish to print all of your new designs, but it is well worth it.
More Courses
SchoolhouseTeachers.com offers courses for additional subjects such as math, science, and English, but my daughter did not do any of those this year. Instead, she used Algebra: A Teaching Textbook for math and BJU Writing & Grammar for English.
Together with my other daughter, we have completed Apologia: Exploring Creation with Physical Science textbook and Apologia: Exploring Creation with Physical Science notebook for science and Route 66: Travel Through the Bible workbook along with the teacher’s edition (on CD) for Bible. We’ve also been reading through the Who Was book series. You can see all of the books we have read together from the series on my Pinterest board here. (The library is a great resource for the majority of these books!)
I intend to publish a post with all of the courses my other daughter took this past year on SchoolhouseTeachers.com with the description of each of them in her own words. In the meantime, you can check out all of the courses we have completed using SchoolhouseTeachers.com on my Pinterest board here if you would like.
Brigitte Brulz 