Some comments on Tilden's transition:
Grades are new. Quiz scores are low in some areas because he's still learning that grades are how we rate our mastery of content. This is in stark contrast to the prior years at Waldorf, where information was shared to build capacity, and less about building structured content retention. I expect this transition to take some time.
Self regulation of educational materials is new. He gets to pick his T4L which activities he does in a day so long as his weekly quota is filled. This is a trial to see how he does being more autonomous, where he accelerates and where he encounters trouble. What I'm finding is that Science is much more dense reading and loses him almost right away. And math has some holes.
So I'm considering this:
- disengaging from the weekly parsed material that T4L automatically generates when you purpose the year's beginning and end dates and
- pushing harder on the T4L language arts,
- going back to his 3rd grade workbook, and
- pushing off T4L science off for a few months.
- adding a foreign language component: latin or spanish
Overall things are good. I'm focused on a nice transition to homeschooling with T4L 5 days a week as the core along with 90 min of reading EVERY day. He seems to like the idea of online school more than a workbook. He's enjoying the added free time it avails him to explore other interests. He does enjoy youtube more these days and we are closely getting to the point where he can write a report for his eportfolio on everything he watches.
Also, we are slowly getting there but the plan is to map all the places we explore in Oregon and blog what we see and learn. I want him to learn how to travel - navigate, research, explore interest, budget, reflect on the adventure...