Anyone heard of Acton Academy?

[drjuliadc]

My 4 year old twins started at a local Montessori school this school year.  I picked it because they let them go 2 times per week and I like the owner.

They announced in late October that they were now an Acton Academy.  I need to decide if they will continue to go next fall. They will have to go 3 days per week, but I was going to do that anyway.

They meet the age cutoff for Kindy by 5 days but they were born 3 weeks early. There are no grades at Acton Academy, so it doesn’t matter there. I like the public schools here but my kids are too bored until 3rd grade when the gifted program starts. My oldest is probably still too bored in gifted, but not enough to get into trouble like before.

Has anyone heard of it? It is an umbrella school started by a Harvard business school grad.  It has gotten some really good press.  

Most of their students are using Khan academy for math but that isn’t required. They can use anything they want. I saw that one student chose Saxon. There are 5 teachers for 30 students, so I know it isn’t all computer learning. 

One of the 12 year old students was doing SAT prep on Khan and said she just took the SAT and got 1310 on it. I don’t know if that is typical because she was one of the few I spoke to. The high school students do most of their classes as dual enrollment at our local community college and local 4 year college.

My kids are probably just garden variety gifted, like me, not anything profound.  I thought elementary school was so drawn out and could have been finished way earlier. Like 4 years earlier sounds about right to me, so I like that idea. I am old so there weren’t any gifted programs back then.

[Wheres Toto]

We have a bunch of them around here.   They call themselves micro-schools or hybrid schools, and advertise as being learner driven and collaborative.  The ones around here seem very unschoolish, and I've seen them turn away older kids who they felt weren't self-starters.   I have the impression that it's more project based learning there and things like math are done at home.