Unit 1 – Getting Started (Weeks 1–3)

Week 1 – Welcome to Digital Brand Studio

Skill: Introduction to Graphic Design

Students learn:

1. What graphic design is
2. Where we see design every day
3. Course expectations
4. Portfolio setup
5. Basic computer organization

Project: “My Designer Name Page”

Week 2 – Learning Canva

Students learn:

1. Logging in
2. Finding templates
3. Text
4. Elements
5. Uploads
6. Pages
7. Saving projects

Project: Personal “All About Me” graphic

Week 3 – Designing with Purpose

Students learn:

1. Good design vs. poor design
2. Contrast
3. Alignment
4. Simplicity

Project: Favorite Quote Poster

Unit 2 – Design Foundations (Weeks 4–8)

Week 4 – Color

Students learn:

1. Color psychology
2. Choosing color palettes
3. Using color intentionally

Project: Inspirational Instagram-style graphic

Week 5 – Typography

Students learn:

1. Font personalities
2. Font pairing
3. Readability
4. Hierarchy

Project: Book Cover

Week 6 – Layout

Students learn:

1. White space
2. Balance
3. Visual hierarchy

Project: Event Flyer

Week 7 – Images

Students learn:

1. Choosing photos
2. Cropping
3. Transparency
4. Layering

Project: Travel Advertisement

Week 8 – Design Challenge

Students review everything learned so far.

Project: Redesign a “bad” flyer into a professional-looking design.

Unit 3 – Branding (Weeks 9–11)

Week 9 – What is a Brand?

Students learn:

1. Logos
2. Colors
3. Fonts
4. Brand personality

Project: Personal Brand Board

Week 10 – Logo Design

Students learn:

1. Simplicity
2. Icons
3. Memorability

Project: Design a logo

Week 11 – Marketing

Students learn:

1. Designing for an audience
2. Promotional graphics
3. Social media

Project: Social media advertisement

Unit 4 – Putting It Together (Weeks 12–14)

Week 12 – Build Your Brand

Students choose a business, ministry, club, or organization (real or fictional). They create:

1. Brand name
2. Mission statement
3. Color palette
4. Font choices
5. Mood board

Project: Brand Identity Board

Week 13 – Design for Your Brand

Using the brand they created, students design:

1. Business card
2. Flyer
3. Social media post

Project: Marketing Set

Week 14 – Showcase & Reflection

Students complete one final piece of their choice (such as a presentation slide, YouTube thumbnail, sticker, poster, or menu), present their brand, and reflect on how they’ve grown as designers throughout the course.

Project: Portfolio Showcase

Class Introduction Video

Coming soon…

✨ 🍋 ✨ Why Lemons-Aid? ✨ 🍋 ✨

A BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW: The Bible, infallible and inerrant, is the very written word of God, who has revealed Himself to man. The Bible is like the light we cast on all content areas in order to understand it, whether that be literature, physical science, history, or geometry. Students learn all content through a Biblical lens. Theology is important for understanding all subject areas. We carefully curate courses that capture learners’ imagination while pointing them to God through sound doctrine. THIS is most important!

RICH CONTENT / CORE KNOWLEDGE: While other schools and systems try to align their content to broad standards that are vague and open to wild interpretations, we focus our content on what students should know and be able to do so they see the world biblically and head into their adult lives filled with knowledge, wisdom, and mastery of skill such as computing and writing. For over a century, progressive education reform has been “anti-content,” which means they de-emphasize rich content and focus instructional time on things such as self-esteem and “skills” they hope will benefit a learner in the future. This is why American kids do so poorly in testing compared to nations with content-rich curricula. We want our learners to increase in knowledge and grow in wisdom, which our content-area experts foster while teaching.

EXPLICIT TEACHING: We understand the skills and concepts students need to learn and know how to teach them. Lemons-Aid’s materials are top-notch, organized, and clear for students and parents to understand. We are especially skilled at breaking down a complicated process into understandable parts. Further, explicit instruction is “a structured, systematic, and effective methodology for teaching academic skills. It is called explicit because it is an unambiguous and direct approach to teaching that includes both instructional design and delivery procedures. Explicit instruction is characterized by a series of supports or scaffolds, whereby students are guided through the learning process with clear statements about the purpose and rationale for learning the new skill, clear explanations and demonstrations of the instructional target, and supported practice with feedback until independent mastery has been achieved.”

• Explicit Instruction: Effective and Efficient Teaching by Anita L. Archer and Charles A. Hughes.

Anita Archer trained Mrs. Lemons in workshops, and it changed her teaching. Read a little more about the research behind explicit teaching here and here.

STUDENT ACCOUNTABILITY = ACHIEVEMENT: Students master skills with us and make gains. We have a high degree of accountability. Since we make promises here and parents are paying good money, we understand you trust us to work! Students have to work too, and let’s be honest: they’re kids and don’t always want to. We push it. We teach them how to stay engaged, we cold-call on kids, we tell them to use the chatbox, and we want them to use emojis! If they are resistant, we contact the student through the teacher tab first. If that doesn’t work, we call in the big guns–Mom and Dad. We want kids to learn. We don’t want them to pass through our classes without gaining skills and doing great learning.

DO HARD THINGS. Boost your confidence, master new skills, learn new concepts. This takes a commitment to do hard things. Like the standards we have for our teachers, we also expect our learners to do hard things, whether that means they stand firm in their convictions, learn geometry, write an essay, or give an oral presentation. You can do hard things!

HEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS: To balance our high expectations for their learning and behavior, we build relationships with them. We want them to know we care about and know them. We’ll ask about their play last weekend or the new trick they’re trying to master on the skateboard. We also want students to get to know each other and encourage community engagement.

DEPENDABLE: Multiple teachers are teaching this class, and we have an entire year of lessons planned and scheduled. Since we are a mission-driven organization, we protect our brand and the relationships with our families. We are accountable to our learners. When things come up for teachers, we work to get substitutes and do everything we can before canceling a class. We do not like canceling or changing, and we often teach classes at a loss to give others a chance to join. We have limits, of course, but we are not flippant or irresponsible about canceling! When things come up for students, since we have multiple sections, they can transfer from section to section. All our teachers teach the same content the same week, giving families even more flexibility!

TEACHER FEEDBACK: The back-and-forth work between a student and teacher significantly benefits a student if done well. We follow best practices in designing class time, assignments, and routines. According to Pennington Publishing, effective writing feedback (or grading) is:

• Specific, not general
• Immediate, not postponed
• Routine with a revision / feedback cycle
• Explanatory
• The right amount
• Targeted to the most critical issues
• Varied (written, audio, and video comments)
• Holding students accountable

WORKSHOP TIME: We use “workshop time” so students will work while the teacher answers questions, gets them started, and holds them accountable. In a writing class, the teacher “visits” learners on their Google Documents and watches and helps them write. The immediacy of the feedback/revision cycle with the instructor allows writers to improve rapidly. Additionally, once we started using this method in writing classes, we saw nearly a 100% completion rate in student essays!

GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS: Students need graphic organizers to help them see the structure and breakdown of a concept or process. For example, we use them to help learners understand how to write a paragraph or essay and to use the writing process. This is how they learn to develop coherent ideas. They don’t figure out how to do this magically; the graphic organizers and the intentional, explicit teaching help them learn the skills!

STUDENT MASTERY: Each class includes explicit, direct instruction with teacher modeling. Students are guided toward mastery of skills and understandings to grasp the concepts and become independent. Students are held to a high standard of academic work, including often ignored skills like the use of grammar and neatness in math.

STUDY THE BEAUTIFUL

We are surrounded by the mediocre, which is not good! We see this in expectations at some schools, the poor customer service at a store, and even architecture like in a gray, uninspiring complex of high-occupancy housing.

In contrast, we are surrounded by the beautiful, which is good! We see the beautiful in classic literature, music, and beautiful architecture like pictured here.

The mediocre demoralizes learners while the beautiful inspires.

At Lemons-Aid Learning, we study the beautiful: classic literature, artful sentence construction, art, poetry, maths, God’s hand in all of history, and God’s very creation. His creation glorifies Him, and in our study of all content areas, we learn about who God is.

We do not compromise. This means we don’t choose a graphic novel of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We read the original play. We know how to make the complexity and beauty of classic study approachable and understandable to a modern audience. It’s more difficult, but worth the effort!

CUSTOMER SERVICE

We serve the Lord and we work hard for families. We work to give quick responses to questions, authentic and careful feedback, and to solve any conflict. As home educators ourselves, familiar with the joys and struggles of teaching our own children, we can relate! We are supporting families, equipping learners, and serving Christ. We are 100% devoted to Him and to you!

To read more about our teaching and learning methods, read our blogs, written by our teachers and staff.

The Lemons-Aid Team

Lemons-Aid teachers have a few things in common.
❤️ They love their students and value each of their unique strengths and personalities that make our classes special. Our classes can be described as fun, personal, academic, challenging, and supportive.
🤩 We work to keep learners engaged, so there is always a degree of student accountability for their attention and focus, whether that be through asking them direct questions or by using the chatbox.
💭 We know all kids can learn, but sometimes things are hard! To support students, we teach them how to develop effective thinking and learning habits that will bring them success in class and in life.
🌟 Building relationships with students so they know we care about them helps us balance the high expectations we have for them regarding their effort, work quality, and behavior. Our students are encouraged, cared for, and they achieve!

𝑱𝑬𝑵𝑵 𝑹𝑰𝑨𝑳𝑬: English Language Arts
#Experienced #Knowledgeable #Empowering #Patient #Rises Above the Ordinary.
As a certified English teacher, Jenn has taught in some capacity over the course of the past twenty-five years. She has taught middle school and high school English classes in both private and public school settings, tutored international ESL students online, developed and taught literature and public speaking classes for a local homeschool co-op, and homeschooled her own two children. Jenn has a bachelor’s degree in English Education. A strong believer in lifelong learning, Jenn has also taken several graduate-level courses related to teaching. Jenn enjoys spending time with her husband, Mark, and their two teenagers. She enjoys taking day trips close to where they live in upstate New York. In her spare time, Jenn enjoys singing and performing in plays. Additionally, she enjoys curling up on the sofa to read a good book. More than likely, one of her four cats will be curled up at her feet.

𝙍𝙊𝘽𝙀𝙍𝙏 𝙒𝘼𝙇𝙎𝙃: Coding/Tech
#developer #experienced #fun #making-learning-relevant #entrepreneur
I like the Gospels, especially Matthew, Mark, and Luke. I also like Acts. I enjoy the Bible not only for its message but also for its historical context, and I think these books in particular give a sense for what it was like in that time period. I hold a B.S. in Secondary Mathematics Education and an M.Ed in STEM Leadership. I am currently certified by the Mid-South Association of Independent Schools (MAIS) to teach a variety of subjects including computer science. While I did teach math in public school for a few years, those degrees book-end a career spent in technology, largely as a software developer. I bring my extensive experience, not only in creating technical products but also in the process of creating technical products, to every class that I teach. Learning for me should be a fun experience, so even though I am very focused on the material we are studying, I believe we can have a good time while doing so. Learning should also be relevant and have a purpose, so I like to give lots of real-world examples and connections. I like sports and played several growing up. I also like to read and work in the yard. The best part of my job is creating the projects that we then do in class. Coming up with new ideas, figuring out how to make them work, then preparing and teaching the lessons is a blast!

Christian Teachers on Outschool

Lemons-Aid Coupon Code:
We want to serve you on Lemons-Aid! For first-time learners on Lemons-Aid, you can use the coupon code Newbie20 to get $20 off your first class.

Outschool Coupon Code:
If the schedule on this platform doesn’t work for you, we will happily teach you on Outschool, but we can’t talk about Jesus. Use this referral code and get $20 off your first class on Outschool: LEMONSA2020

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