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Williamsburg Academy


Targhee
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Anyone have experience with this school? All the information on their website seems really polished, but I would really love to hear some first hand experience. How does the online classroom work? Are the courses well-designed (from a classical perspective and from a general perspective)? They seem to have had the high school up for a little while and are just getting the middle school going. I am thinking about course work for my 6th grader in the fall.

 

http://williamsburgintermediate.org/

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Anyone have experience with this school? All the information on their website seems really polished, but I would really love to hear some first hand experience. How does the online classroom work? Are the courses well-designed (from a classical perspective and from a general perspective)? They seem to have had the high school up for a little while and are just getting the middle school going. I am thinking about course work for my 6th grader in the fall.

 

http://williamsburgintermediate.org/

 

No personal experience, but a friend of mine with teenagers uses Williamsburg Academy and is very pleased with it.

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No personal experience, but a friend of mine with teenagers uses Williamsburg Academy and is very pleased with it.

 

 

Thank you, I am glad to hear it. The 2012-13 school year is the first for the intermediate school, I found out. There probably are not a whole lot of people who have had experience with it.

 

There are three programs which are interdisciplinary - Leadership, Hmanities, and STEM. I really like the idea of leadership courses. The humanities program integrates social studies and language arts. The STeM program looks very interesting, but it is hard to tell just how beefy it is. And the math is integrated, so not set up to prepare for advanced math in high school (ie you can't take algebra or geometry and be ready for Alg II in high school). I may just have to call someone from the school and talk about it.

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  • 9 months later...
  • 2 years later...

We did 2 years with the intermediate school. The schools are now combined, though separated in a similar way as to the first few years - basically a name change. The first year my DD took STEM and Leadership, the second year she took Leadership.

 

The mentors were good - caring people, positive, encouraging, and overall you could tell they were interested in helping the kids successfully transition from grammar (Love of Learning) to dialectic (Scholar) phase.

 

The STEM class was a bust for my DD who is advanced in maths and sciences. It was more like a "physics for poets" approach, and lacked the objective scientific habits of mind I believe critical. There were 3 or so books a semester, literary mostly fiction, which they read and discussed. They covered scientific concepts and there were lots of discussions, but they were more humanities type discussions :P My DD loves reading and good literature, but she does not like "learning _____ through literature" type programs. It was a poor match.

 

The Leadership class was good. They use Crocodikes International each year to learn and strengthen different character qualities. They also do lots of self-assessment and reflection projects to practice new skills and see how using them makes a difference in their lives. Leadership also included weekly creative writing assignments, 3-4 books a semester on which there was a colloquium style discussion about, and a culminating project.

 

my reason for using the school was to get DD used to working with other teachers, keeping track of assignments, being accountable to someone else, etc. It did help her soft skills. It was gentle, which is what she needed for her first outside classes (she's very sensitive to criticism, and a bit anxious about doing things 'right.')

Edited by Targhee
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