Overview of Courses

What makes us unique? There are plenty of companies out there that provide online courses, but only a subsection who teach live, for that personal touch. Of those live providers, not many will engage subject experts to do all the teaching, and hardly any have had those courses actually designed and delivered by the same person who's teaching the class.

Dreaming Spires ticks all those boxes: live, online plus designed and delivered by the tutors themselves, but wait! That's not all! 

All tutors at Dreaming Spires are hand-picked by the CEO for their subject expertise and proven teaching skills. Additionally, they all have years of experience as home educators, giving you the confidence that they understand the opportunities and challenges of beating an alternative path to success. 

Finally, Dreaming Spires is unique by the method we use, an organic, student-led approach codified by the Victorian educator Charlotte Mason, and of proven effectiveness for the past 120 years. To read more about this method, see this page.





How exactly does that work? At Dreaming Spires, we apply the “CM Method” through weekly one-hour webinars taught live and online, using high-quality and stimulating books, and assigning fairly simple written tasks that build on a student’s own understanding and experience. 

The commitment is usually around four hours per week, and our courses last a full academic year, or 30 weeks.

Some courses have add-on extension options like English, Ancient Greece, New Testament culture, and the earlier levels of French and Spanish. These offer more focused attention on individual attainments and entail another 2-3 hours of homework a week. We have a separate page about these on the website.

Webinars are conducted along these lines: the tutors talk and use a Powerpoint for visual aids while the students type their responses in a chat box. We rarely use webcams because the bandwidth requirements are sometimes too much for our students in foreign mission fields. Some students feel a bit self-conscious at first about typing in the chat box, but they soon learn that spelling, punctuation, and that sort of thing, are no big deal in terms of accuracy. As long as their ideas are coming across, that’s what matters.

The overall approach at Dreaming Spires is a great leveler: we’ve had students with special needs, those who travel the world, youngsters who are gifted, and even some attending from hospital beds, and no one is the wiser. Everyone feels welcome.

The ultimate outcome for your child depends on your goals: Dreaming Spires is able to satisfy requirements and objectives for both the US college-bound system and the UK exam system. Use these links to find out more about each one:


US college-bound system

UK exam system