Schaeffer Educational Cooperative
2015-2016 Academic Class Offerings
Chris Schaeffer teaches at three different locations:
Cornerstone Tutorial (Severna Park) on Mondays, Bridge Tutorial (Bowie) on Tuesday/Thursday Mornings
and my own Schaeffer Cooperative on (Wednesdays)
Shakespeare 2016 - Spring Semester– Cost $95 (2nd and subsequent children in the same family are $90) Starts March 16-May 11, 2016 (there will be a break for the Gaithersburg class on March 23rd (Montgomery County public school calendar) and there is a possibility of a week off in the week of April 27th - TBD - this course is appropriate for grade 5-12.
Please take the time to click on this link and read a SYNOPSIS of the play by Charles and Mary Lamb if you aren't familiar with the romantic comedy.
Sign up for Schaeffer Homeschool Tutorial classes by clicking HERE
Offered with the Schaeffer Homeschool Tutorial in Bowie
Junior World Regional Geography – Fall Semester – Wednesdays 10am-12noon - Bowie – $190 -Instructor Chris Schaeffer
This is a 10 week course that teaches the students the locations of the 200+ countries of the world, plus the basic physical and political geography of North America, South America, Africa and Asia. The students use weekly currently events concerning the area of the world that we are studying to keep them interested and to show them the relevance of geography in today’s world. The course culminates with the students all participating in the National Geographic’s School Level Geo Bee.
High School - World Regional Geography
Instructor: Christine Schaeffer, Class Length: Full Year (30 weeks) Cost - $350 (half payable in September, the 2nd half in January)
Class Locations: I will be teaching this course at Bowie (Wednesday afternoons from 1-3pm) Cornerstone (Mondays)
Reason to have your student take the course: Most Americans know very little about the world they live in. Very few are familiar with the location, let alone the cultures of countries outside of North America. This course is designed to get the attention of the students and get them interested in world events in an engaging and academically stimulating way. This is not a boring, fact-memorizing course - each area of the world is introduced and explained in the context of current events as well as pertinent world history. This involves the students researching current events concerning areas all over the globe and learning how to interpret them using Geographic and Demographic terms. I use a lot of multimedia, including video and audio, to instill a baseline of sound geographic knowledge in each student. I feel strongly that this course is far more than a geography course - it's a course designed to teach each student involved how to gather information about their constantly changing world and give them the tools to be able to interpret this information in a meaningful (and hopefully profound) way.
Description: This challenging course will take a full year, divided into two semesters. The course will walk the students around the approximately 200 nations of the world using a regional approach and heavily relying on the Five Themes of Geography (Location, Place, Human Environment & Interaction, Movement and Region). Each class will use current events to cast light onto the region being studied, thereby cementing the information into the memory of the student. The first semester has a cumulative term exam and the second semester has a Final Team Project which is presented at the Geography Banquet in late March.
Expectations: Each student is expected to prepare for each class, arrive promptly, and treat the tutor and his/her fellow students with the utmost of respect. Note taking is expected and will be rewarded by a far higher score than those who do not take careful notes. A project will be completed in the spring semester: This small group project will culminate in my Annual Geography Banquet held in March. The work for the course will involve approximately 3-5 hours a week outside of class. This does not include research for projects. The homework will include reading articles, coloring in the secondary Coloring Book text, doing online research, reading current events and writing up short write-ups on them, and taking in class quizzes and take-home tests (one “take-home” honor system mid-term will be administered in the fall semester).
Texts will include: Isaac’s Storm by Erik Larson, The Geography Coloring Book by Wyn Kapit (3rd Edition), The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwanba, and Smithsonian’s Earth. In addition to these four books I would like each student to have a current atlas .
Materials: Each student will be required to have the following supplies: a loose leaf notebook with sections, writing tools, and have access to a computer and the Internet. I rely heavily on email communication and expect my students to have access to the internet for research. Their final project in the spring semester will need Microsoft PowerPoint.
Internet & Multimedia: I will be accessing Google Earth and other Geography Teaching internet sites during class on my laptop. This is essential to showing the students the information pertinent to the various areas of study in geography. I will also be using educational DVD materials from the ABC Newsroom during some classes.
Assignments: Assignments are due each week. If they are turned in late then they are 10% off for the first week late, 20% off for the 2nd week and will not be accepted after that point. The Current Event Notebook is ESSENTIAL to the course. This means your student should be allowed to watch the news or look online for current event several days before the class. I recommend the BBC World News, though it can be a bit harsher than American news channels.
Courses being offered through Bridge Tutorial in Bowie:
Political Science – Exploring the “isms” of the 20th and 21st Centuries - Looking into World History and Exploring Dystopian Literature Full Year - Full Year
This year-long course will explore the rise and spread of Marxism, Socialism, Fascism, Nazism, Communism and other “isms” through books, lectures, movies and current events. It will satisfy two credits – one for World History and the other for World Literature. It will involve reading, writing, vocabulary and comprehension quizzes, discussions, watching movies, visiting the Holocaust Museum and a class project/banquet in the spring semester.
The goal is to get the students thinking seriously about the profound effects the Communist Manifesto and Marxism have had on our modern world. I will guide them through the 20th and 21st century manifestations of Marxism through books and articles, dwelling on the catastrophic failures of Hitler’s Nazism (including the Jewish Holocaust), Stalin’s Communism (including the Ukrainian Holodomor), Mao’s Communism (including the Massive Starvation related “Great Leap Forward”) and North Korean Communism (through eyewitness accounts of the Political Prisoner Camps). The point will be to help the students identify the signs and dangers of these ideologies in the world around us.
This generation of school age children has been influenced by a new set of dystopian books. We will discuss these books and the possible reasons for the resurgence of this genre. We will investigate the elements of The Hunger Games and Divergent Trilogies that are active in our world today.
I will use these books: The Giver, Animal Farm, 1984, Night, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Hunger Games Trilogy, The Divergent Trilogy, The Communist Manifesto and possibly one or two more. In addition to these books I will also assign news articles and other shorter items to read.
We will watch the movies “Animal Farm”, “Sophie Scholl” and the “The Soviet Story”. These movies are intriguing and intensely thought provoking. We will go on a field trip to the Holocaust Museum after our viewing of the movie “Sophie Scholl”.
The final project of the class will be a project that will ask the question: “Now you have seen manifestations of these doctrines throughout modern history, do you see evidence of these emerging anywhere around the world?” The idea is that the students will be reading and watching current events and deciding if they see situations in countries anywhere in the world that show signs of malicious ideologies emerging.
To sum up, the course is designed for students who are mature enough to discuss serious world and current events that are somber in nature. The students will be interacting a lot and will learn to listen and respect one another’s views. They will learn to analyze the news and to look for patterns that may indicate things to come. They will read and write a lot throughout the year, with each assignment building on the information they have learned each step of the way.
You are welcome to email Chris at [email protected] to ask more questions.
Fundamentals of Digital Photography – Fall Semester –Twice Weekly on Tuesdays and Thursdays at the Bridge Tutorial in Bowie - Instructor Chris Schaeffer – this is a fast paced course in which the students learn how to use a Digital SLR camera. They progress through automated settings until they are photographing in manual mode. They learn many techniques and develop their own unique style of photography. The course culminates with the students participating in a Photography Show with their fellow students.
Advanced Digital Photography – Spring Semester – Twice Weekly on Tuesdays and Thursdays at the Bridge Tutorial in Bowie - Instructor Chris Schaeffer – This is an intensely computer oriented course where the students learn to process their digital photos in the Adobe Photoshop software. This requires that each student have a laptop computer and an academic subscription to the online software of Adobe Photoshop. Any student who is serious about photography will benefit immensely from this course. We take a day field trip to NYC and we also create a photojournalistic project that we then publish an Advanced Digital Photography yearbook.
Sign up for these three courses directly through the Bridge Website
- Wednesdays - 10am-12noon - Bowie - 11903 Bracken Court, Bowie, MD 20720
- Wednesdays - 1:30pm-3:30pm - Rockville - at The Amazing Art Studio, Downtown Crown, 115 Crown Park Ave, Gaithersburg MD 20878
Please take the time to click on this link and read a SYNOPSIS of the play by Charles and Mary Lamb if you aren't familiar with the romantic comedy.
Sign up for Schaeffer Homeschool Tutorial classes by clicking HERE
Offered with the Schaeffer Homeschool Tutorial in Bowie
Junior World Regional Geography – Fall Semester – Wednesdays 10am-12noon - Bowie – $190 -Instructor Chris Schaeffer
This is a 10 week course that teaches the students the locations of the 200+ countries of the world, plus the basic physical and political geography of North America, South America, Africa and Asia. The students use weekly currently events concerning the area of the world that we are studying to keep them interested and to show them the relevance of geography in today’s world. The course culminates with the students all participating in the National Geographic’s School Level Geo Bee.
High School - World Regional Geography
Instructor: Christine Schaeffer, Class Length: Full Year (30 weeks) Cost - $350 (half payable in September, the 2nd half in January)
Class Locations: I will be teaching this course at Bowie (Wednesday afternoons from 1-3pm) Cornerstone (Mondays)
Reason to have your student take the course: Most Americans know very little about the world they live in. Very few are familiar with the location, let alone the cultures of countries outside of North America. This course is designed to get the attention of the students and get them interested in world events in an engaging and academically stimulating way. This is not a boring, fact-memorizing course - each area of the world is introduced and explained in the context of current events as well as pertinent world history. This involves the students researching current events concerning areas all over the globe and learning how to interpret them using Geographic and Demographic terms. I use a lot of multimedia, including video and audio, to instill a baseline of sound geographic knowledge in each student. I feel strongly that this course is far more than a geography course - it's a course designed to teach each student involved how to gather information about their constantly changing world and give them the tools to be able to interpret this information in a meaningful (and hopefully profound) way.
Description: This challenging course will take a full year, divided into two semesters. The course will walk the students around the approximately 200 nations of the world using a regional approach and heavily relying on the Five Themes of Geography (Location, Place, Human Environment & Interaction, Movement and Region). Each class will use current events to cast light onto the region being studied, thereby cementing the information into the memory of the student. The first semester has a cumulative term exam and the second semester has a Final Team Project which is presented at the Geography Banquet in late March.
Expectations: Each student is expected to prepare for each class, arrive promptly, and treat the tutor and his/her fellow students with the utmost of respect. Note taking is expected and will be rewarded by a far higher score than those who do not take careful notes. A project will be completed in the spring semester: This small group project will culminate in my Annual Geography Banquet held in March. The work for the course will involve approximately 3-5 hours a week outside of class. This does not include research for projects. The homework will include reading articles, coloring in the secondary Coloring Book text, doing online research, reading current events and writing up short write-ups on them, and taking in class quizzes and take-home tests (one “take-home” honor system mid-term will be administered in the fall semester).
Texts will include: Isaac’s Storm by Erik Larson, The Geography Coloring Book by Wyn Kapit (3rd Edition), The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwanba, and Smithsonian’s Earth. In addition to these four books I would like each student to have a current atlas .
Materials: Each student will be required to have the following supplies: a loose leaf notebook with sections, writing tools, and have access to a computer and the Internet. I rely heavily on email communication and expect my students to have access to the internet for research. Their final project in the spring semester will need Microsoft PowerPoint.
Internet & Multimedia: I will be accessing Google Earth and other Geography Teaching internet sites during class on my laptop. This is essential to showing the students the information pertinent to the various areas of study in geography. I will also be using educational DVD materials from the ABC Newsroom during some classes.
Assignments: Assignments are due each week. If they are turned in late then they are 10% off for the first week late, 20% off for the 2nd week and will not be accepted after that point. The Current Event Notebook is ESSENTIAL to the course. This means your student should be allowed to watch the news or look online for current event several days before the class. I recommend the BBC World News, though it can be a bit harsher than American news channels.
Courses being offered through Bridge Tutorial in Bowie:
Political Science – Exploring the “isms” of the 20th and 21st Centuries - Looking into World History and Exploring Dystopian Literature Full Year - Full Year
This year-long course will explore the rise and spread of Marxism, Socialism, Fascism, Nazism, Communism and other “isms” through books, lectures, movies and current events. It will satisfy two credits – one for World History and the other for World Literature. It will involve reading, writing, vocabulary and comprehension quizzes, discussions, watching movies, visiting the Holocaust Museum and a class project/banquet in the spring semester.
The goal is to get the students thinking seriously about the profound effects the Communist Manifesto and Marxism have had on our modern world. I will guide them through the 20th and 21st century manifestations of Marxism through books and articles, dwelling on the catastrophic failures of Hitler’s Nazism (including the Jewish Holocaust), Stalin’s Communism (including the Ukrainian Holodomor), Mao’s Communism (including the Massive Starvation related “Great Leap Forward”) and North Korean Communism (through eyewitness accounts of the Political Prisoner Camps). The point will be to help the students identify the signs and dangers of these ideologies in the world around us.
This generation of school age children has been influenced by a new set of dystopian books. We will discuss these books and the possible reasons for the resurgence of this genre. We will investigate the elements of The Hunger Games and Divergent Trilogies that are active in our world today.
I will use these books: The Giver, Animal Farm, 1984, Night, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Hunger Games Trilogy, The Divergent Trilogy, The Communist Manifesto and possibly one or two more. In addition to these books I will also assign news articles and other shorter items to read.
We will watch the movies “Animal Farm”, “Sophie Scholl” and the “The Soviet Story”. These movies are intriguing and intensely thought provoking. We will go on a field trip to the Holocaust Museum after our viewing of the movie “Sophie Scholl”.
The final project of the class will be a project that will ask the question: “Now you have seen manifestations of these doctrines throughout modern history, do you see evidence of these emerging anywhere around the world?” The idea is that the students will be reading and watching current events and deciding if they see situations in countries anywhere in the world that show signs of malicious ideologies emerging.
To sum up, the course is designed for students who are mature enough to discuss serious world and current events that are somber in nature. The students will be interacting a lot and will learn to listen and respect one another’s views. They will learn to analyze the news and to look for patterns that may indicate things to come. They will read and write a lot throughout the year, with each assignment building on the information they have learned each step of the way.
You are welcome to email Chris at [email protected] to ask more questions.
Fundamentals of Digital Photography – Fall Semester –Twice Weekly on Tuesdays and Thursdays at the Bridge Tutorial in Bowie - Instructor Chris Schaeffer – this is a fast paced course in which the students learn how to use a Digital SLR camera. They progress through automated settings until they are photographing in manual mode. They learn many techniques and develop their own unique style of photography. The course culminates with the students participating in a Photography Show with their fellow students.
Advanced Digital Photography – Spring Semester – Twice Weekly on Tuesdays and Thursdays at the Bridge Tutorial in Bowie - Instructor Chris Schaeffer – This is an intensely computer oriented course where the students learn to process their digital photos in the Adobe Photoshop software. This requires that each student have a laptop computer and an academic subscription to the online software of Adobe Photoshop. Any student who is serious about photography will benefit immensely from this course. We take a day field trip to NYC and we also create a photojournalistic project that we then publish an Advanced Digital Photography yearbook.
Sign up for these three courses directly through the Bridge Website