Online courses and games transform learning for a lifetime.
Children & teens, parents & teachers, community members & seniors follow their curiosity, learning what they need each step of the way.
How is 6 Arts Academy different?
Each course integrates 3 key elements:
Academics
Apply concepts in new situations
Social & Emotional Learning
Relate better to yourself and others
Innovation
Build curiosity, prepare for the future
Academics
Project-Based
Engage students in the excitement of discovery with authentic learning. Immerse them in meaningful, real-world projects. Help them gain new perspectives. Provide original sources. Combine subjects (such as math and art) in one project. Guide students in creating portfolios and sharing them at a celebration.
Constructivist
Encourage deeper understanding through multi-sensory experiences. Observe and reflect with students. Help students apply concepts in new situations. Weave authentic assessment into projects.
Collaborative
Emphasize teamwork so students achieve higher levels of learning. Challenge students to engage in conversation by explaining their thoughts and responding to each others’ ideas.
Academics: Daily Lessons
1. Warm-Up
Students start the day waking up their brain, body, and heart by combining cognition with emotion, physical exercise, and community building.
2. Engage
Students use playful activities that combine cognitive and emotional themes, tuning into what they know to get ready for new learning.
3. Activate
Students engage in meaningful experiences using their senses, feelings, and personalities. Through reflective thought, writing, and discussion, they bring their prior learning to new concepts in an environment of trust, respect and openness.
4. Reflect
Students are guided to synthesize and integrate new learning to facilitate the application of knowledge, attitudes, and skills.
5. Transform
Students transfer their learning to another context, develop deeper problem-solving skills, and apply new understanding to purposeful and creative projects.
6. Store
Students are encouraged to store the lesson in long-term memory by repeating what was learned and completing a short exercise at the end of the school day.
Know Yourself
Understand what you’re feeling and doing. Recognize your patterns and name emotions so you can accurately know yourself.
Choose Yourself
Instead of reacting, pause to think about the consequences of your actions. Choose wisely what you do.
Give Yourself
Think about the impact you have on others and act kindly towards them.
Engage:
Create cognitive and emotional hooks to create interest, activate pre-existing knowledge, and develop a context for new learning. At the end of this phase, participants should see the value of the subject matter and be ready for more.
Activate:
Build capability and enroll the brain through real-time experiences that blend emotional and cognitive content; bring powerful mental models to life so participants can begin to learn and test out new concepts. At the end of this phase, participants will have new knowledge plus a “gut level” experience of the concept.
Reflect:
Integrate new learning by synthesizing and concluding, so this knowledge, attitudes, and skills can be more readily applied. At the end of this phase, participants should know what they’ve learned and a commitment to put that into action.
Innovation
Explore
Explore a challenge. Define questions and generate new ideas.
Envision
Envision potential solutions. Use a design-thinking approach to see a problem from different perspectives, determine challenges, and share ideas.
Execute
Collaborate to build prototypes, test, revise, iterate to improve what you are building and implement the final solution.
An example of Academics, Social & Emotional Learning, and Innovation applied together
The big idea students asked:
How can we apply our knowledge of physics and human biomechanics to creating an original obstacle course?
Academics
Everything we see in class, we see in the real world:
- Linear momentum
- Angular momentum
- Different kinds of conservation of energies
Social & Emotional Learning
When we work together, we learn how to:
- Collaborate
- Compromise
- Delegate
Innovation
When we think of something, we can do it knowing that:
- Open-ended design projects require spending a lot of time being frustrated
- All interesting projects are complicated and involve unknown factors
- Our goal is to keep going while feeling frustrated.
Knowing how something works and applying it in new situations is valuable.
What did Nobel Laureates say was missing from their schools?
“Each Nobel Laureate I spoke with told me they wished they had learned how to relate better to themselves and other people. That’s why I integrated social and emotional learning into the Nueva and Synapse schools in the U.S. I’m pleased to bring these skills to 6 Arts Academy in China and the rest of the world.”
—Karen Stone-McCown, Founder of the Nueva School, Co-Founder of Synapse School and Six Seconds