Treehouse For Creative Kids

My 7 yo daughter spent a week of summer camp at TCK. She had a great time learning art and acting. The teachers seemed to have lots of fun with the kids while teaching them how to draw, use pastels, make sets, act, etc.
This is a small operation, and might not be a smoothly run as other places. But it is a good and unique experience.

In a nutshell, only send your child here if they are very, very self-​directed, and you’re ok with an administrative staff that does not communicate well and gets defensive quickly.
I was excited to find Treehouse. My son, now 10, has always been a drawing enthusiast, and he’s always wanted to be able to draw better and more realistically. Many of the classes around were not a good fit for a kid with two working parents — I just can’t get him to a 4:30 class on a weekday. Treehouse used all the right terminology, and assured me that their process would assess where he was at currently and work with him to develop skills, teach him to capture motion in drawing and build some fundamental skills. Moreover, there were a lot of different class offerings, so if we had a conflict on one day he could take that class at another time.
It sounded great in theory.
And my son was very, very excited to start off with. The teacher was very nice. The assessment of his skills was more informal than expected, but she met with me after to give some feedback. He was thrilled with the class and couldn’t wait to do more. The only issue was taking with the administrator was rather confusing. Treehouse would like you to sign up for a semester, although you can cancel early, and pay monthly. This was tough to follow, believe it or not — I kept getting told that the cost for a semester was somewhere in the neighborhood of $ 600, but if I tried to pay for just a month or two I would be charged at the higher class-​by-​class rate, because I had indicated that at some point in the future my son would stop taking classes. Huh? But we eventually resolve the problem. There were also times when we’d show up for his class and no one was there until 10 min later; when I called to find out what was going on, Tina, the administrator, seemed snippy about how I was early (I was often about 5 min early) and she and the teacher weren’t there. But as long as the classes were good, I worked around these things.
However, in a few weeks my son stopped being interested. He reported that he was bored. Some of this, of course, is him being a 10 year old boy. However when I dropped by the class he was mostly drawing cartoon characters out of a how to draw book. He said he could draw whatever he wanted, but he couldn’t think of anything that was interesting to draw. Ok. Then the rate of complaining increased; art classes he’d had at other places were better, they did more things, he wanted to try sculpture or pottery. Several times when I picked him up he complained that the girls in the class were talking so much he couldn’t concentrate.
Finally I thought I’d let the administration know and see if they could help before I just let him drop out of the class or had it turn into a tortuous chore he resented. The issue with too much talking was a problem, and I wasn’t sure if they were aware. I’ve run programs for kids before; input from parents can be helpful to catch a problem before it gets really out of hand. The boredom issue — I wasn’t sure what that was about. It might be that he lost interest, sure, and maybe there were other classes in pottery or sculpture that he could switch to. I sent an email; Tina did respond by phone. The conversation quickly deteriorated; I was informed that there were issues with my son (first I’d heard of it), that he had the freedom to draw or paint anything he wanted, but he wasn’t interested in learning shading. The girls in the class talk, that’s what they do. The real issue here, I was informed, was that I was defensive (I really just kept trying to circle the conversation back to being helpful and solutions oriented); moreover my son probably wasn’t a good fit for «fine arts.» When I was told that I realized that any feedback that was less than positive was unwelcome, and there was no interest in finding solutions.
C’est la vie. Be aware that the Tina who posted the 5 star reviews actually either owns or administrates Treehouse.