How often these days do you encounter young and even older adults who have no idea about basic life skills such as personal finance or healthy cooking? What impact does nutrition have on our health and how does one even use a hammer? How should we handle all the stress in our lives? How can we tell when we encounter biased news sources?

At Learn Beyond The Book, in addition to all the wonderful academic courses, we are trying to bridge this often-too-wide gap between book knowledge and living real life successfully with classes like Adulting 101, a year-long course covering a wide range of topics from critical thinking and how we write history to practical personal finance, cooking, and more. We also have whole courses dedicated to Cooking and Holistic Nutrition, Sewing, DIY Projects and Personal Finance/Entrepreneurship. Mental health is also a huge concern and a growing problem in our society and therefore we offer classes like Wellbeing 101 and Psychology. We are planning workshops in Growth Mindset as well as Communication and Conflict Resolution. Our college prep class helps students work on their path to college and help guide them to a career that fits their passions. Even if you’ve got this all figured out, but can’t present a seminar or speak in public, that might be problematic, so we offer public speaking courses as well as improv & theater games classes to build students’ confidence! We start these really young so that students are so used to doing it that it reduces the stress often caused when these topics are introduced only later on to older students.

What we often don’t realize is that these life skills classes also involve quite a bit of “core learning” for example in every cooking class or DIY or sewing project, there is math and in every public speaking class, there is writing involved, even if that is not the main focus. Often these types of classes can be a way to get more reluctant writers or math students more involved in real-life applications. Ultimately, though, we can have all the “core learning” down, but if we don’t know some basic life skills, we have a problem, not to mention the “soft skills” like good communication and conflict resolution skills that employers are increasingly looking for in potential employees.

The way we make sure students learn these skills effectively is to ensure that the environment created by highly skilled teachers and fellow classmates are friendly, non-judgmental, and a safe space to make mistakes because how else do we learn? Our teaching methods are community and relationship-based and kindness prevails throughout. Our teachers are passionate about what they teach and experts in their fields. Feel free to check out our teacher bio page for more details.

We offer so many classes because everyone has their own unique needs and we would love to help anyone get better at what they feel they need most help with. Check out our class selection for Fall semester (starting Sep.6) at this link. If it’s easier to search by subject, here is another way to search. If you find you need help deciding, please contact us and we can help.