Pottery Apprenticeship

Tilden has excepted and in formal apprenticeship with a local Potter. In exchange for weekly assistance for the business owner he learns how to work with clay in all it's forms. Eventually he will be helping her offer workshops to seniors, various schools and their students, and at local festivals. He's extremely excited.

Here he is making his 1st cut. I can't wait to see what's next

Working with clay

Tilden hangs out with and helps our clay working friend on occasion. Today he had an amazing time learning lots of terms and techniques - but mostly having fun!!!

Wonder & Wander

Exploring music

At Troubador and exploring instruments today. Planting seeds.

Weekly update from Dad

Still getting into the routine of Weekly updates here.  This is a supplement to Time4Learning and really here to share content beyond online learning materials.

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:

1. disengaging from the weekly parsed material that T4L automatically generates when you purpose the year's beginning and end dates and 
2. pushing harder on the T4L language arts, 
3. going back to his 3rd grade workbook, and 
4. pushing off T4L science off for a few months.
5. 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...  

Wonder and Wander

Nice time with new peeps. Tilden is the oldest boy and a little unsure, but he seemed to enjoy helping youngers and is happy to play dog tail chase with Everyone.

We learned about the history of Beizel Park and some of the natural forest there - it's main focus is a managed forest.

Property Changes science lesson

TLG is challenged with much of the science educational material from T4L, primarily because the words are complex and reading is pretty dense. But also because the quizzes are about grading performance - something new from prior Waldorf years.

So Granny decided to share a project from today's lesson. Below is her capture of the experience. Check out that kids face as he sees how exciting science can be!!!