Banner Academy

Banner Academy is BACK and now accepting Early Bird Enrollments for fall 2024, grades 2-7.

Enroll by Aug 1 and registration fees will be waved.
Contact us to receive a digital brochure.

We'd love to see if we can help your student come us "as awesome as an army with banners" Song of Songs 6:10

Like us. Share us. Enroll with us!

Banner Academy is BACK!

Now enrolling grades 2-5 for Fall 2024.

Banner Academy is offering a soft relaunch with “A La Carte” Courses available to homeschooling or co-oping families. Banner is a one-room schoolhouse approach to mastery based, experiential learning. Our schoolhouse is located on our growing 7 acre ranch, with our 3 dogs, 2 cats, and 2 horses.

Our school year runs on a 5 week on, 1 week break rotation. Units span a 5 week period and then students have a 1 week break. Worried that the school year has already started? No problem! Either ease into the remainder of Unit 1 with a soft entry or join us for Unit 2 beginning October 9th while you continue to work from home.

We are also offering our Rock climbing Team Membership again this year that can also be used as a P.E. Or Elective credit on Mondays 9:30-11:30 AM. The cost of the course included a monthly membership at IBEX climbing gym and free gear rentals on each visit. Students can not only attend on Mondays with classmates but anytime with their membership card. Climbers will learn basic technique, how to use all gear properly, how to use auto-belay walls, work on conditioning, and have lots of fun! Second semester climbers will have the opportunity to become belay certified and belay other climbers. Certification classes have fees required.

All entering students require assessment testing before enrolling in a course. Assessment fees are $40 per student and typically require 2-3 hours. Monthly Payment for course is due after assessment testing, upon enrollment. Enrollments for Unit 1 will be pro-rated. Assessment is not required for Rock climbing Team Membership.

Sorry, we are NOT enrolling full time students at this time.

Courses, pricing, and scheduling is below.

ELA Course (includes Orthography/Spelling, Grammar, Writing Composition, Literature):
Grades 4-6 available
2 hr course
8:30 - 10:30 Tues - Thurs with Friday testing 8:30 –10:30am
email for pricing

History/Geography (Early US history: Indigenous Peoples – Civil War)
Grades 4-6 available
1 hour course
12:00 - 1:00 Mon – Thurs with Friday testing 8:30 – 10:30am
email for pricing

Science (Survey of Life Science, Physical Science, Chemistry)
Grades 4-6 available
1 hour course
1:00 – 2:00 Mon – Thurs with Friday testing 8:30 – 10:30am
email for pricing

Rock climbing Team (PE or elective credit)
Ages 9 – 14 or Grades 4-8
1.5 hour course
9:30 – 11:30 Mondays
$160 / mo includes $40 membership fee that entitles student to climb anytime at IBEX

EMAIL [email protected] to begin your journey with us. We will respond faster to email than FB comments.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of taking my students to Clear Brook Farm to visit our friends from years past and spend a day learning outside our schoolhouse.

So often the best learning occurs not just outside of a traditional classroom, but complimentary to an examination of a text. Experience isn't always the best teacher. I think context is the greatest of all teachers. Context gives us the framework by which to evaluate our experiences. Remove our greatest experiences from that context, and we run the risk of fallacies or relativism.

Often we pit learning from a book or resource against learning from an experience. But if we leave out one, it devalues the other. They were meant to enrich each other, not compete against each other.

We try to give our students those experiences as often as possible. So as we study Manifest Destiny, the Trail of Tears, Jacksonian Democracy, and immigrants seeking new hope on the Oregon Trail - we try to create experiences that put our students in touch with simpler ways of living that might bring that context to life.

At Clear Brook Farm we learned of the Osage Indians that once lived and loved that land as we marveled at arrowhead collections from the creek and hiked to scavenge for our own treasures in the bedrock.

We toured the farm: ducks, chickens, sheep, and pigs and learned breeds and characteristics.

We visited the Mennonite butcher (who processed the hog we purchased from Clear Brook this year) who showed us his simple operation, freshly processed hanging beef and taught us about "dry meat" letting us sample some of the best brown sugar dry cured deer bologna I've ever tasted. We even discovered a few souvenir heads outside the kill station, which his cattle dog guarded with his life.

We ate at a local Mennonite owned restaurant where some of the best food I've ever tasted was cooked without any electricity, where the owners treated you like long lost family, with a general store filled with homemade treats - we made sure to pickup some jam while the kids filled their pockets with candies.

We hiked the land and explored a cave the owner had pre-approved for us - crawl space only, leading back to a "room" with sitting room only and a ceiling full of minerals to explore. None of my students hesitated to crawl into that black hole, possessing the same brave spirit of the pioneers they've studied. I crawled about 30 feet in and decided I'll stick to rock climbing - tight spaces were not my thing.

It was a hard goodbye as the students all felt the joy and freedom of a simpler life, full of woods and wild, community and common faith, and an easy place to belong to. Everyone asked to return, before we had ever left.

Experience, context, and community - these are our great teachers.

Special thanks to Clear Brook Farm for being so good to our kiddos and sharing your lives with us!

Christmas Tree Cutting at 's Country Farm in Greenwood.

I knew when we pulled up to the homestead with a "Jesus is King" flag waving wildly in the crisp winter air, I was going to spend a little extra to support this wonderful Mom & Pops place. The owners were so hospitable to our crew and they even let us roam their homestead and visit with their animals. We talked for longer than my students would have wished in the gift shop about the beauty of Jesus in our lives.

The kids picked out a whopper of a tree that we named Jeoffrey and spent the day decorating the classroom for the holidays.

Each year our students paint ornaments that become our keepsakes and remind us of all the lives we've been blessed to pour into over the years. It's one of my most favorite Banner traditions. When we hang them on the tree each year I get a fresh vision for why I labor.

Happy Holidays Banner Families

They begged me to trade in the school van for this renegade bus. I told them maybe....

Banner Fall Lock-In

There's something about playing together as hard as you work together, and indeed these kids have worked hard so far this year.

Movie Marathons, video game tournaments, crazy table games, more ear-piercing laughter than should be heard at safe decibels, a few quick haircuts, and of course Mrs. Jenn's famous homemade biscuits and sausage gravy with cheesy fire eggs (get your tapitio ready).

Kyle took the boys for a day of wild adventure and gaming at Rush Funplex: lazer tag, go carts, bowling, bumper cars, rock walls - affirming the wild and restless nature so often misaddressed in boys as a "disorder" when really God made us to till the ground not toil at desks. One solves the issue of energy while the other seeks to medicate the energy.

I took the girls for pedicures and Boba tea - affirming their beauty and uniqueness and worth in a moment of "washing their feet." These girls that strive so hard and competitively in their academics, that there mastery performances become an expectation and not an achievement. They often steward so much in the classroom, help with additional chores, and support me in other ways, that it was time to serve them.

My body hasn't stayed up that late, that many times in a row since I was nearly their age, but my heart couldn't sleep. It's so fun watching their personalities spill over, without care or worry of classroom correction.

It's a true moment when a child finds a place they can let their guard down and discover they are enjoyed.

Here you're home. Here you're family.

Experiential Learning
Leavenworth Veteran's Day Parade - noted as the largest and most recognized parade of the country this side of the Mississippi.

What better way to give perspective to students studying our Revolutionary War then to honor those who have fought firsthand in other wartimes?

What better lesson to teach this generation than to say, "Welcome home," to vets of a controversial war who endured horrific treatment returning to their own soil?

What better gratitude can we express, than to de-politicize what it means to be a soldier and simply say "thank you." If not for one day.

I loved the vets who saluted my young men as they lined the street side, as if thanking them. Just for showing up.

I loved the 70+ year old vet who called out to my husband, who wore his dress blues, and saluted him with welling tears. As if thanking him.

I loved the lessons learned that a classroom couldn't teach us

When the classroom loses its wall, it gains its audience.

The Nelson Atkins: Colonial America explored in art. Students spent the afternoon analyzing the bias, reliability, and accuracy of primary sources of art as compared to their textbook portrayal.

We examined our favorite pieces and discussed how they challenged us to see the world, and history, through a new perspective. Then students wrote a reflective poem from the lens of their favorite piece of art, to attempt to accurately reflect the artist's representation of that time of history.

So fun to be surprised by each student's choice of favorite.

Student Quotes:
"I could spend hours in here."

"Can you believe artists were ever this good? Now we just splatter paint and call it art."

"What will a modern art exhibit look like when we're you're age Mrs. Jenn? Probably a blank wall they try to manipulate you into admitting is art because no one wants to put in the effort to be great anymore."

Too often I underestimate the interest of a young mind. I worry so much about being relevant as a teacher and keeping up with their digital age, that I doubt anything else will entertain their imagination.
But entertaining attention and imagination are two separate things

..And of course....post museum shenanigans ensued....

Children will stare: either into a screen or into the depths of Creation as far as their imagination may limit them or free them.

As a teacher I am in constant competition with a digital age that can in a moment mesmorize with the latest special effects, steal attention with a tide pod video, or otherwise grip the boredom that may have grown into creativity had it been given the chance to plant its seed and take root. And let's be honest...as their adults, we have become just as captive.

Today I loved hearing my students identify the "femur" and "phalanges" bones of digested remains of a barn owl during their lab for our Skeletal & Muscular System Unit of Anatomy & Physiology Class. They marveled at the amount of bones compacted into one owl pellet. They hypothesized about its habitat and environment from the types of fur viewed under a microscope.

Teachers...we have alot to compete against...but nothing is more fascinating than the simplicity of Creator and creation. Keep it simple. The world is already wraught with overcomplication.