Do you recommend WTMA to prospective families?

[SoniaSJ]

Hello,

We are a family looking to homeschool our kids next year and I really like the ideas behind the Well Trained Mind. I believe a classical education is important to being well informed and well adjusted individual.

If you currently have students attending WTMA (especially if they are in upper elementary or middle school), would you recommend it?

Do you like the courses your child has taken?

Have you liked their teachers?

Thank you,
Sonia

[8filltheheart]

First, welcome to the forums and welcome to homeschooling.  It can be a grand adventure that takes your children on an educational journey like no other approach.

In answer to your title question, not normally, but it has nothing to do with WTMA.  When I meet new homeschoolers, I ask them why they are opting to homeschool and if they understand all of the options they have when they are no longer conforming to classroom education.

I have never used WTMA, but then I have never used online classroom education for elementary or middle school children.  My answers to my own questions are that I homeschool specifically in order to not conform to classroom education and provide my kids an education that matches their unique individual educational needs and our family's educational philosophy (which doesn't include worksheets or short answers or book reports or tests. )

Hopefully people will provide you feedback on the actual WTMA courses.  🙂

Edited June 10, 2021 by 8filltheheart

[SoniaSJ]

Thank you Alice! I am excited to start! I want to homeschool my girls so I can give them flexibility and freedom to learn about and pursue their passions. I can't see how they will ever get that I our local public school. Do you recommend a particular curriculum?

[egao_gakari]

Welcome! I can't speak to elementary, because we didn't start WTMA courses until DD was in 7th and DS was in 9th. In our experience, the coursework, expectations, etc., varied widely depending on the instructor. WTMA offers its instructors a lot of flexibility regarding course development, disciplinary policy, etc.

Both kids have taken science courses with Dr. Eaton and Dr. Bennett. They loved Dr. Bennett's courses and felt they learned a lot. (DD a couple of weeks ago commented that she wishes she lived in Dr. Bennett's house so she could get answers to her science questions on the spot!) Neither of them felt the same about Dr. Eaton though - they both agreed that she's very nice, but they didn't understand her explanations usually, and didn't come out of her courses feeling confident about the chemistry topics she covered.

Both of them also took writing with Ms. Meyers, and they liked her, but she has moved on from WTMA.

DS took a literature course with Mr. Wells and liked it all right. However, Mr. Wells has a unique way of doing comprehension quizzes - they appear on the website for about 48 hours and then vanish, so if your kids are disorganized like my DS, they'll have to be writing a lot of emails asking him to open the quiz up again. Other instructors leave the assignments up for longer and take points off for lateness instead.

One other thing to note is that WTMA courses fill up fast. They have a one-week period in February for current students to register for summer and fall courses before they open enrollment to new students. In our experience, beloved teachers like Mr. Caro and Dr. Bennett tend to max out their class capacities within 24 hours after the current-student registration week begins, and new students (and current students whose parents aren't on top of it 😛 ) wind up waitlisted, or signing up for classes with less popular teachers. (Not saying less popular automatically means poor quality though!) This may not be as big an issue for the elementary courses, though, since most homeschool families don't start outsourcing/online courses until late middle or high school.

[8filltheheart]

Just now, SoniaSJ said:

Thank you Alice! I am excited to start! I want to homeschool my girls so I can give them flexibility and freedom to learn about and pursue their passions. I can't see how they will ever get that I our local public school. Do you recommend a particular curriculum?

Not Alice....I just fell down a rabbit hole when I started homeschooling.  🙂  Many days yrs ago when all of my kids were little, I was definitely more like the Mad Hatter!  Just call me 8.  😉

I'd recommend starting off with more basic questions than curriculum.  What do envision your days being like?  How do you picture your girls finding their passions and pursuing them?  I am very much a follow their interests homeschooler.  My kids have had the ability to explore all kinds of subjects, some of them finding their life long passion as children.  My born engineer is a chemE.  My language loving dd just graduated with degrees in Russian and French.  My physics/math loving ds is a physics grad student.  My meteorology loving dd is a rising college sophomore majoring in atmospheric science. 

My approach has been lots of whole books, reading about topics that spark their interests.  Writing is researching more about topics they are reading.  No workbooks.  No tests.  Just lots of reading, discussion, writing.  They pursue projects on their own in their free time.   

Unit studies are great for interest led learning.  Literature based curriculum is good for reading based approaches.  Oak Meadow is more of a Waldorf approach.  Or, you can just come up with your own reading lists, projects based on whatever themes you and your kids want to study.  Add in math, spelling/grammar, and writing and you have your own vision of what you want to learn.

[egao_gakari]

6 minutes ago, SoniaSJ said:

Thank you Alice! I am excited to start! I want to homeschool my girls so I can give them flexibility and freedom to learn about and pursue their passions. I can't see how they will ever get that I our local public school. Do you recommend a particular curriculum?

Most people on this board at least loosely follow the guidelines set out in The Well-Trained Mind, which has curriculum recommendations for each subject at each grade level rather than a "one-box" approach, although there are plenty of options out there for if you want like a "starter kit" for your first year 🙂 But whether you decide to pick and choose from the suggestions in The Well-Trained Mind or get the "5th grade curriculum" from like Kolbe, Memoria Press, or someplace else, don't feel required to do a million things! In our first year, I way, way overscheduled my 4th grader and 6th grader. Thinking back on it, I wish I'd had the confidence to do less academic work and spend more time out in the world learning through experiences.

[8filltheheart]

3 minutes ago, egao_gakari said:

Most people on this board at least loosely follow the guidelines set out in The Well-Trained Mind, which has curriculum recommendations for each subject at each grade level rather than a "one-box" approach, although there are plenty of options out there for if you want like a "starter kit" for your first year 🙂 But whether you decide to pick and choose from the suggestions in The Well-Trained Mind or get the "5th grade curriculum" from like Kolbe, Memoria Press, or someplace else, don't feel required to do a million things! In our first year, I way, way overscheduled my 4th grader and 6th grader. Thinking back on it, I wish I'd had the confidence to do less academic work and spend more time out in the world learning through experiences.

LOL, you read a different forum than I have been part of for the past umpteen yrs.  I would say over a decade ago many posters followed the WTM.  Nowadays, very few.   I would say that many posters are at least familiar with WTM, more with Story of the World, but using WTM recommendations? Doubtful.

[egao_gakari]

3 minutes ago, 8filltheheart said:

LOL, you read a different forum than I have been part of for the past umpteen yrs.  I would say over a decade ago many posters followed the WTM.  Nowadays, very few.   I would say that many posters are at least familiar with WTM, more with Story of the World, but using WTM recommendations? Doubtful.

Hah, I guess that's fair enough. There's less actual edposting on this forum now anyway, so I haven't actually seen what people are up to in a long time. When I first joined like 5-6 years ago a lot more people were talking TWTM and education topics in general, now it's mostly the chat board that's active 😄 

[SoniaSJ]

Thanks everyone! I have seen this advice of not overdoing it over and over again. I definitely want to cultivate a more relaxed attitude to learning based on life experiences and interests so I will keep this in mind. 

[SoniaSJ]

In consideration that few of your kids have taken WTMA online courses, this question may only apply to a few. 
My rising 6th graders should take the Middle Ages course since Ancient Times is covered in 5th and this would be the first year homeschooling. Nevertheless I still don’t know if it’s worth skipping Ancient Times.  What do you think if you are familiar with the courses? Ty!

[egao_gakari]

3 hours ago, SoniaSJ said:

In consideration that few of your kids have taken WTMA online courses, this question may only apply to a few. 
My rising 6th graders should take the Middle Ages course since Ancient Times is covered in 5th and this would be the first year homeschooling. Nevertheless I still don’t know if it’s worth skipping Ancient Times.  What do you think if you are familiar with the courses? Ty!

Not speaking out of personal experience, so hopefully you'll get a few more answers, but I'd guess either would be fine. When I began homeschooling my fourth grader, that should have been Modern Times year, but I decided to start her on Ancients instead so she got "the whole story." (We weren't doing WTMA at that time though, we did it on our own.) In retrospect, I'm not confident that she retained much of it or that it really created a "foundation" for Middle ages study. I think it would have been OK to start wherever was most interesting to her. The important thing is to continue onward chronologically from where you start, if possible. She's entering ninth grade this year and begged to skip Ancients and go straight to Medieval. I'll probably have her do Ancients in twelfth, since I think the exposure to that time period is important, but the exposure doesn't have to happen right now while she's passionate about something different.

One additional consideration is class demographics. The WTMA courses are mixed-grade, so the Ancients class is likely to have some fourth graders and some sixth graders mixed in, and Middle Ages will probably be a mix of fifth, sixth, and seventh. The first time she took an online course, as a 7th grader, my daughter complained that many of her classmates seemed immature, couldn't stay on task, and sometimes derailed the class by scribbling on the teacher's slides or chatting about unrelated things in the chat box. I'd guess that the Ancients class might skew younger, making those sorts of problems more likely.

[Miss Tick]

History is a nice class to do as a family since you can often accommodate multiple ages pretty easily.

You might want to check out this thread @Plum pinned at the top of the General Education board -

 

[Hunter]

On 6/10/2021 at 9:37 AM, SoniaSJ said:

Hello,

We are a family looking to homeschool our kids next year and I really like the ideas behind the Well Trained Mind. I believe a classical education is important to being well informed and well adjusted individual.

If you currently have students attending WTMA (especially if they are in upper elementary or middle school), would you recommend it?

Do you like the courses your child has taken?

Have you liked their teachers?

Thank you,
Sonia

Sonia,

Welcome!!!!!

I started homeschooling before TWTM book was written and finished long before the academy was created. One of my children did use a correspondance school for his entire homeschool experience; one was mostly schooled by me. The correspondance school was by phone and snailmail back then. LOL. 

When this forum first started (1999? 2001?), the most active homeschool forum was hosted at a vegetarian site and we were not allowed to talk about meat, there. Some of the first heavy posters, here, were merely meat-eaters that wanted the freedom to post about meat-eating without beign censored. Then the other forum had some tech problems and this forum was hit by a flood of people, many that had no interest in a classical education.

Now, those that use the academy are an even smaller fraction of the people that post here.

Good luck getting your questions about the academy answered. I am sorry that I cannot help you with that, but I wanted to welcome you to the forum. Welcome!

[FO4UR]

On 6/10/2021 at 11:37 AM, SoniaSJ said:

Hello,

We are a family looking to homeschool our kids next year and I really like the ideas behind the Well Trained Mind. I believe a classical education is important to being well informed and well adjusted individual.

If you currently have students attending WTMA (especially if they are in upper elementary or middle school), would you recommend it?

Do you like the courses your child has taken?

Have you liked their teachers?

Thank you,
Sonia

I'm another veteran HS mom who has not used WTMA. 🤭

 

I find that if I am going to teach or facilitate or even supervise the course, I want to be in control of the course. 

It drives me bonkers to enforce work that I wouldn't have chosen. 

My older 2 did hybrid online/ps due to covid and one dropped a course for that reason. The material wasn't transferring well online and we were all frustrated. 

Another example for why I don't prefer online courses: I chose a novel for my 8yo that she had a negative reaction to. I just dropped the novel. We talked about why. It was a life lesson in making different choices for our mental health. That's not possible in an online course. 

 

But, there are many benefits as well. If those negatives don't apply to you, the online courses might be worth a shot. 

[cintinative]

I think you are going to find more people outsource for online courses in junior high and high school for various reasons.  

We didn't start outsourcing until 7th and part of the reason was to see if online courses even worked for my kids.  I believe Susan Wise Bauer recommends this somewhere--it's best to try and fail when it doesn't count for anything then to find out in high school it doesn't work.  

My particular kids would not have done well with an online class prior to 7th. I think the time sitting and doing one class might have been too much, for my youngest especially.  

We have not used WTMA, although it looks great to me. It's mostly been a financial thing that has prevented us. 

We have loosely followed the text The Well Trained Mind from the beginning. I like it for the book recommendations and overall view of where you are and where you are going. I adjusted various things based on curriculum choices and what I knew about my own kids (and also other factors like teaching a class at co-op). I know it can be overwhelming to start with so many options, so the text is a good launching point I think.