Yearly Homeschool Update: 2021
In order to tell you about our 2021 homeschool year so far, I unfortunately have to tell you about our 2020 homeschool year first. While this will be a walk down memory lane I truly don't want to take, I am willing to do it in order to share with you.
I know that I am not alone in saying that our 2020 school year was incredibly hard. For my friends who public school, they were faced with "crisis homeschooling", which was totally unfair to all involved. Many of my friends had new found respect for homeschool and some even decided to completely pull their kids out of public school. One thing I want to make sure you understand, is that even though we were already homeschooling pre-pandemic, our homeschool was still affected by the shut downs. Many of our meet ups and field trips were cancelled, and not just that, but I know my kids felt the heaviness of the world. Maybe not as much as other kids, but they definitely felt it.
In addition to the worldly complications, last year ended up being challenging academically for both my kids. My first grader was learning to read, while my 9th grader was getting into some difficult levels in Science and Math. For myself, I was really feeling the pressure of what both grade levels had in store. Sean was already at the point where he was learning subjects that I remember struggling in. One of my big goals for the year was making sure I did not pass on my "math anxiety" to him.
Last year, we were using an online program called Monarch for my oldest. I've written about it before and it was a great fit for our family for several years when we first started homeschooling. There was very little grading/planning I had to do and we didn't have to order boxes upon boxes of curriculum books. Unfortunately, last year was finally the year that Monarch started not fitting us well.
First, I think it's really hard to learn high school level Science and Math from a screen. Second, my child simply outsmarted both myself and the program. I am going to share what happened not to make my child look bad, but to help other parents be aware.
I started noticing that my son's answers were VERY close to the answers from the teacher portal. I was sure he was cheating somehow but I wasn't sure how exactly and I was worried about making the accusation. We had heard of kids who knew how to crawl the code of the website pages and find the answers. We had also already found websites where other students were posting the answers. We promptly blocked those websites but yet, he was still cheating.
Finally, one day I was grading a Spanish lesson. The teacher key said "student should use verbs similar to xyz..." and my kiddo wrote "student should use verbs similar to xyz..." as his answer.
He was caught.
I sat him down and said, "I know you're cheating, I just want you to tell me how."
He replied, "I will tell you if you promise not to yell."
I promised and he went on to tell me that he had figured out my password to the teacher portal and had been cheating since the beginning of the year. At this point we were about half way through his Freshman year.
I calmly excused him and called my husband in to talk about how to move forward.
As usual with me, I threatened to send him to public school. Except that the public schools were all virtual already. They'd literally send him right back home to me. And then my husband made the point: if he will cheat at home then he will cheat at school.
So, we prayed about it. I prayed about the heart of a child that thinks it's okay to cheat and the heart of a parent that wants to do better. We ultimately decided that online school was no longer going to be an option for us. Besides making cheating easy, there had been issues with him getting distracted by You Tube or other forms of entertainment. In his defense, it was just a click away from his schoolwork! Also in his defense, I had made my teacher portal password the same as our wifi password. It was almost too easy.
Here is the cool thing about Monarch: it's one option of many from Alpha Omega Publications. My younger student was already using workbooks from AOP called Horizons that we love. We decided to stick with this program for 2nd grade and for the first year we are doing all 5 subjects: Math, Phonics, Spelling, Health, and Handwriting. So far, so good!
Another option from AOP is LifePac. I had heard good things about LifePac from friends. LifePac is similar to Monarch wherein it's student led/paced but instead of being on the computer they are in "packs". Each subject has 10 packs that make up a year. I found some curriculum used and bought the rest new. We are doing History, Bible, Geometry, Biology, Language, and Spanish 2. We are only a couple weeks in, but I can already tell that he is retaining way more information having to write things out than before! After spending months being nervous, I am actually really excited for our year.
Another tool I am using this year is the online planner from Well Planned Gal. It has weekly planner pages I can print both for my student and for myself. It also has a transcript builder that is such a Godsend! A high school transcript is something that keeps me up at night. I was able to easily enter our grades from 9th grade and I can see the transcript taking shape. I also enter our LifePac grades weekly so it's building out a progress report for us as well. Many of the subjects were available to be automatically assigned, I just had to set the school start date. The subjects that I had to manually enter actually went faster that I thought. Overall, I am very excited and thankful for this product!
So, there you have a look back on 2020 and a happy look forward to our 2021 homeschool! What questions do you have for me? What homeschool tools do you use? Message me on FB or IG!
XO - Olivia