Hellobee

When lockdown was announced here on March 13, 2020, we left the island capital and returned to El Nido the very next day. We had to pull the kids out of their school and there was an online option, but since we knew we wouldn’t return to the island capital, we opted out of it. For a long time the kids didn’t do much during the pandemic except read a lot every day. Because the tourism industry isn’t likely to recover here for years, we started thinking about moving back to the US. And thinking about putting my island raised kids into public school was terrifying! The adjustment from moving from an island in the Philippines to the US would be much more difficult than it had been the other way around. We’ve been here 6 years and this is the life Charlie and Olive know. That’s how I got the idea to enroll them in a US-based online school.

The kids are behind in some areas because their school wasn’t as academically rigorous as what they would be doing in the US, and we took a pandemic gap year off. In New York, where we moved from, the school year cut-off is December 31st. We’ll most likely move to Los Angeles to be closer to my family, and the California cut-off is September 1st. Charlie and Olive have October and December birthdays, so that means they would be starting 4th and 6th grade this academic year per California’s cut off.

With some parents reluctant to send their kids back to school in this pandemic era, online homeschooling has become more popular than ever. After a lot of trial and error, the main program we use is called Acellus Academy/Power Homeschool. Acellus Academy is a US-based accredited online private school for grades K-12. Power Homeschool uses the exact same curriculum, but you don’t get a diploma or interaction with teachers. Most families tend to opt for Power Homeschool for elementary and junior high, and then switch to Acellus for high school for the diploma. There is a big price difference in the two programs — Power Homeschool is $25/month and Acellus is $79/month.

Currently Charlie and Olive are taking 4 core classes: Math, English Language Arts, Science and Social Studies and 2 electives: Foundations of Music and Intro to Coding. They set a timer for 4 hours a day, and work Monday-Saturday, spending about 30 minutes on each subject and an additional hour on a separate writing program. Most families do less, but Charlie and Olive are behind in some subjects like Social Studies since they studied Filipino history here and not US history, so they are catching up.

This is what I like about the program:

1) Self-paced. You can do as much or as little as you want. You can follow the school year calendar, you can catch up if you’re behind, you can get ahead if you want. Each class has a number of “steps,” and you can divide the number of steps in a course with how many weeks you’d like the course to last. For instance a typical school year is around 30 weeks. If a class is 300 steps, then you input a weekly goal of 10 steps per week if you want them to finish on a 30 week timeline. You can put in more, you can put in less, and the child can exceed the minimum number of weekly steps if they want. You can also take time off any time you want and work that into your schedule.

2) No textbooks. It’s hard for us to access textbooks here, so it’s great that everything is online. Kids watch pre-recorded instructional videos and do all the coursework on their ipads.

3) I don’t have to teach. Charlie and Olive are at a great age (almost 10 and 12) where they can study independently, and they don’t need much help from us.

4) It’s affordable. $25/month per kid is a great deal!

5) Easy record keeping. There is a parent app where I can see everything from attendance, grades, and how much time they spent on each subject. I can even monitor the kids live to see exactly what they’re working on at that moment. These are Olive’s classes. She’s finishing up a review of 3rd grade since she wasn’t in school the past year, but because she reads a lot she finds 5th grade language arts to be easy. I love that I can choose different grade levels for each subject. For instance Charlie’s classes span 3 different grade levels!

6) Tutoring Mode. There are two different modes – teaching mode and tutoring mode. Tutoring mode allows you to see all the lessons in a course, and allows the child to rewatch videos, retake tests, and jump around. This mode gives the parent the most control. Teaching mode works more like regular school where the lessons keep moving forward and you can’t see all the lessons ahead of time.

7) Facebook groups. There is an official Acellus/Power Homeschool Facebook group with 7.5k members, and an unofficial parent group with 19k members. They provide a wealth of information and parents have taken it upon themselves to create notes for practically every course, then uploaded it into the unofficial Facebook group.

8) It’s mobile. They can do homeschool anywhere. We’re going to visit my family in the US soon, and they’ll be able to continue doing their homeschool while they’re there.

9) There are over 250 courses. and kids can take up to 6 at a time. There aren’t as many courses available in the elementary level, but they offer many high school electives including AP courses.

10) Common core. The courses align with common core standards so if we decide to transfer to an in-person school, they will have used a similar curriculum.

11) The kids enjoy it. We tried a lot of different programs before settling on Power Homeschool. It keeps the kids engaged, and I never have to nag them to do school. They wake up and start on their own every morning. Charlie usually wakes up early and finishes before noon. Olive wakes up later and finishes after lunch.

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The main con of the program is that its writing curriculum is not strong, so most parents supplement, and we do too with a program called Night Zookeeper. The kids also went from virtually no screentime to being on their devices all day, but what can we do in these pandemic times, especially since in person school is not an option where we are.

Any other parents out there using an online homeschooling program?