About Me
Hi, I'm Court, a homeschooling mom of three and the founder of Atlas Road.
Most of us grew up on the same handful of fairy tales: the three little pigs, Goldilocks, Cinderella, told so often we know them by heart. Not that I don't love those stories. We actually keep different variations of them on our bookshelf.
But how many of us know how Brer Rabbit tricked Whale and Elephant into a tug-of-war neither one could win? That story has been passed down for just as many generations. It just never made it onto the same shelves or into the same textbooks. It's one of countless stories and histories that have gone quiet because so much of what we were taught runs through a European lens.
That's the gap Atlas Road exists to close.
I make nature and social studies unit studies rooted in geography, history, folktales, art, music, and food, both U.S. and world, built to hand kids a wider map than the one most of us grew up with. And I make shadow puppets, drawn from folktales and fairy tales from cultures across the globe, because I believe the oldest way to teach a child about a place is through its culture.
Kids don't come to appreciate a culture through a list of facts. They come to appreciate it through its art, its food, its music, its stories, its movies. That's why our Studio Ghibli unit study isn't really "about" the studio at all. It's a way into Japan. My Neighbor Totoro becomes a doorway into Shintoism and the spirits believed to live in the trees. Grave of the Fireflies becomes a way to sit with what World War II actually cost a family, told from the inside instead of the outside.
If that's the kind of learning you're looking for, welcome. I'm glad you're here.