Las Cruces Academy

The Arts

The arts are a crucial part of a good education for many, many reasons. Even at a basic level, they build spatial relations, hand-eye coordination, aesthetic awareness, pattern recognition, vocabulary, and more. Even without those benefits, they provide a wide range of mediums for expression and generally enrich our lives.

We talk about "the arts" instead of "art" because we intend to study music, painting, sculpture, pottery, drawing, literature, architecture, and any other aesthetic endeavor that comes across our way. We will start at a very basic level while the students work on fine motor control. As they grow more artistically capable and develop some understanding of aesthetic principles, we'll move to more complicated art projects. We hope by this time to have obtained funding for orchestral instruments and other great things for them to start using.

Social Studies

Social studies, also known as studying history, geography, and more, isn't learning names, dates,places, and what those people did on those dates. It's learning about chains (or webs) of events, how they led to each other, what that means about the parties involved, and how it affected each party and innocent bystanders.

We spend extended periods of time studying particular cultures. Unlike many schools, our focus is not mostly western history. We spend significant time on both western and eastern history and on the interactions between the two. It's worthwhile to note that social studies does not (at least initially) delve much into current events. That will be left for the after-lunch class we're going to talk about below.

Special Topics

No matter how well you plan a class, plenty of really interesting and important things will come up that you'd like to talk about, but that would you far off-topic. Those things can be current events, things from a suggestions box, or grandparents who want to come in and share some experiences from their youth. We've made a special class for all of the above and more called "Special Topics." There is no long-term structure to the class, since it's devoted to whatever topic we feel is most worthwhile to discuss on a particular day. Sometimes we bring in news articles or interesting personalities. Other days we talk about concerns the children (or adults) have brought up.

Anybody, parents included, is welcome to suggest a topic. The topic doesn't have to be something that can be presented in a single class, but it does have to be something that can be covered a little more concisely than the Roman Empire.