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Summer Online Courses for Junior High and High School Students

• Around the World in Nine Days

  $225.00
  An introduction to global Geography for the 21st Century. During our first session, we'll explore the nature of geography and its branches — physical, social, environmental, and regional, and the disciplines of mapmaking and chartmaking to display information tied to locations. During the following seven weeks, we will look at major regions of the world, focusing on physical geography. In our final session, students will present reports on a region or country they have selected to study in detail. Students taking this course will be better prepared to understand historical information, literary references, and current events.

• Looking at Middle Earth

  $225.00
  Based on the books, not the movies, this course considers many facets of J. R. R. Tolkien’s mythic creation, especially as embodied in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. (Acquaintance with The Silmarillion or the multi-volume History of Middle-earth won’t go amiss, but is not required.) In a fairly free and un-pressured context, we look at Tolkien’s world-building, his use of language, his theology of “subcreation”, and certain facets of his life and professional work as a philologist that have a bearing on the vision he created. I’ve been a fan of Tolkien’s works since I was thirteen, and never tire of sharing them with a new generation.

• Summer Shakespeare II

  $225.00
  The second in a three-year summer survey of Shakespeare's plays. This year study All's Well that Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Henry VI (Parts 1-2-3), Love's Labour's Lost, The Comedy of Errors, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and The Winter's Tale.

• An introduction to programming with SCRATCH

  $225.00
  Learn the elements of basic programming using the innovative SCRATCH programming platform developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. SCRATCH lets student developers assemble pre-compiled code blocks, forcing them to focus on developing conceptual programming skills that can be applied to any advanced programming language. Hands-on chat sessions guide students in the use of Scratch in "real time", so that students create executable animation programs in the very first session. Course materials are based on "Starting from Scratch", a textbook designed to introduce programming concepts, including function calls, loops, if-then-else logic, and iteration to novice programmers at any level.

• The Chemical History of the Candle

  $225.00
  This eight week course will use the lectures Michael Faraday delivered in 1861 as a starting point to discuss scientific methods and experimentation, chemical composition of wax, combustion reactions, forces and energy, and the history of the human scientific endeavor. Faraday is still regarded as one of the greatest experimental scientists of all time, and his lectures are filled with his excitement over the wonders of natural phenomena, as well as detailed observations on the behavior of elements like hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon, and practical demonstrations of experimental observational methods.All students will have the opportunity to perform adaptations of Faraday's experiments to develop proper experimental techniques (with an emphasis on lab safety) then submit their lab reports for teacher and peer review, and discuss their experiences in online class sessions. Get a head start on labs for AP Chemistry!

• The Forces of Nature

  $225.00
  This eight week course will use the lectures Michael Faraday delivered in 1859 as a starting point to discussclassical mechanics, chemical bonding, electricity and magnetism, and gain experience using the scientific method of experimentation and writing lab reports. Faraday is still regarded as one of the greatest experimental scientists of all time, and his lectures are filled with his excitement over the wonders of natural phenomena, as well as very practical instruction on the nature of gravity and the interaction of electrical and magnetic forces, as well as practical demonstrations of experimental observational methods. All students will have the opportunity to perform adaptations of Faraday's experiments to develop proper experimental techniques then submit their lab reports for teacher and peer review, and discuss their experiences in online class sessions. Get a head start on labs for AP Physics 1 and 2!

• Molding Your Prose

  $225.00
  This course fosters familiarity with the writing process by asking the student to write a sequence of exercises based on the same basic narrative material. Along the way, students learn that written material does not steer itself: it can be adapted almost infinitely to a variety of forms and requirements. In this respect, it is an introduction to both other writing courses and to literary study.

• Molding Your Argument

  $225.00
  Modeled on "Molding Your Prose", this course involves developing a sequence of arguments from the same topics by varying their structure to correspond to a range of pre-defined forms, from simple thesis statements and simple paragraphs, through the five-paragraph essay, the Thomistic scholastic model, and the Roman rhetorical outline applied by Cicero and his contemporaries.