Parts and Crafts

Originally founded as a summer camp focused on making, building, taking things apart, programming, art, science, and boffer-swording, we started a homeschool resource center in 2012 that is Not a School, despite some kids coming all 5 days. Until this March, we ran M-F, serving about 50 kids in various capacities as a school-replacement, a place for socialization to supplement their other homeschooling activities, one-on-one tutoring, small group classes, or just a place to play with all of the wacky stuff in our building. Kids help determine the classes and schedule with huge brainstorms 4x/year. Since going online, we have tried to maintain the "flavor" of Parts & Crafts, having a daily morning meeting where we give our pitches for our projects & classes, offering lots of interesting stuff with interesting people, that the kids then opt into. We publish our weekly schedule on Sunday & kids can also decide on the fly what they want to do.

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We primarily work with curious and quirky kids aged 7-13, who are super interested in things that are off the beaten path. Now that we're online, we can expand those ages for online learning, as long as the kids are able to do the activity. Some of our projects & classes require kids to be able to read and write, like for Scratch, Java Processing, Mock Trial, etc., but many others don't (drawing, paper weaving, rope-making, plastic jug pigs) and some require parent involvement at some point, especially cooking classes (even if it's just acquiring the ingredients). We get kids who come to our unschool, CSCL for many reasons, from being lifelong homeschoolers, finding themselves suddenly incompatible with mainstream schooling, really as many reasons as we have kids.  We are not a therapeutic program, however, our main rule of "Be Excellent to Each Other" helps all kinds of kids thrive socially in a way they often can't in mainstream schools.

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