Colleen Hroncich
When parents in her Georgia community saw Christina Jones’s homeschooled children thriving, they were intrigued. They started asking her questions and wondering if they should—and could—homeschool their own children. Christina decided to create learning pods to give other kids some of the creative learning experiences she was providing for her own children. She started with three pods with around five children in each who met on different days of the week for hands-on, theme-based learning.
Before too long, Christina combined the separate pods into one and transitioned to an enrichment center. She offered 12-week sessions featuring hands-on, project-based learning with themes changing every other week. As interest continued to grow, she realized it was the right time to pursue her dream of opening her own school, which she named Academy of Creatives. Looking back on her journey, she says, “I think everything was really just a soft launch into actually creating the entire microschool.”
Christina recognizes that different families have different needs, so she has a variety of options. “We offer a five-day program, a three-day program, and a two-day program,” she explains. “Some families need an all-day program where they can send their children for core academics and enrichment five days a week. Some just want to send them for the core academics, and then they want to be responsible for the fun stuff, I call it, you know, the enrichment days, the field trips. And then we have the two-day option, where it’s really for our homeschoolers. So the homeschoolers come to the center, and they’re able to engage in field trips and cooking classes and Spanish classes and science projects.”
Monday through Wednesday are the core academic days. The main instruction happens in the morning, where they have center rotations with lead instruction as well as hands-on, game-based learning and possibly some computer-based learning. After lunch, they have small group and one-on-one time for students who need more reinforcement in any subject. Every afternoon, the kids have a chance to do “anything creative and makerspace‑y” during STEAM time. “You know, being creative with their hands and building things and creating things,” Christina says. “It’s also a time for them to utilize the robots and things like that that we have at school. So, coding and 3D printing and things like that.”
Thursdays and Fridays are enrichment days, which often have monthly or weekly themes. “The learners are learning, but it’s just in different ways,” says Christina. For example, in May, they had a water theme. The kids had swimming lessons at the YMCA, and then at school they learned about buoyancy and density and did hands-on projects testing those things.
“Making the school a project-based learning, STEAM-based, hands-on school, we have seen such a tremendous increase in just the love for learning in general,” Christina says. “And I think that was definitely my main vision and mission—to instill a love for learning. A lot of learners, they get kind of shifted in traditional school spaces, slip through the cracks, and things like that. And so families that look to have their learners come to the Academy of Creatives, that’s because maybe their learners have kind of fallen into the cracks a bit, and they need that smaller school setting, personalized, that really gears towards their interests in a hands-on, fun, and creative way.”
Christina registered Academy of Creatives for the new Georgia Promise Scholarship education savings account. “I think that’s something super exciting for Georgia to have,” she says. “Just being able to allow other learners that maybe couldn’t have had an opportunity to go to a private school, and being able to just get a better education, better learning environment for them. You know, being able to cater what it is for them that they need.”
In addition to growing her own microschool, Christina is trying to build a local network. “There is one other microschool, and we have collaborated throughout this school year on various occasions with field trips and things like that,” she explains. “We are trying to just kind of get out there to see if there are any other non-traditional learning environments that maybe we just don’t know of because we would love to be able to network with everyone for our immediate community so that families can know what they have in the community here in Columbus, Georgia.”
Christina is also part of a larger network since she partnered with KaiPod to get the Academy of Creatives up and running. “That support has been phenomenal. I really think it’s something very beneficial for people that are barely starting out, and they kind of want to run new ideas off of a community or a network of people. And then to being able to not have to recreate the wheel because they help with things like templates and all of those things,” she says. “They have been phenomenal throughout this process.”
For others who are considering starting a microschool, Christina recommends digging deep down to know why they’re doing it. “There are so many ups and downs, and the vision behind why you’re doing what you’re doing is what continues to motivate and push you,” she emphasizes. “You definitely have to be in it for the right reasons.”