Abeka vs Monarch and Why We Switched

today we're going to talk about becca versus monarch [Music] hey everyone while i have the camera out today and doing some filming of some recipes you guys have requested including pumpkin spice sugar free or low carb not 100 sugar but it is low carb pumpkin spice cold coffee check them out coming up soon i wanted to do the sit down video that everybody has requested a lot of people thought one of two things one we instantly went crazy and switched from doing a hardcore using books only curriculum to all digital or two we did it because of circumstances in 2020 and neither is really correct let's talk about that today this one is going to be more of a chatty video i want to give everybody a heads up and explain what happened as i was doing first semester grades at the end of the 2019 first semester of 2019 2020 school year i started evaluating the girls grades and they were going down it was an intense curriculum with so much constant review so much writing so much book work yet their grades were going down their attention span focusing on their work was going down so much was going worse for them and i was like okay what is going on this is a curriculum that's very focused on constant review of math very focused on a strong phonetic spelling based curriculum why aren't they learning as much then every year at income tax time i look ahead to the next school year the first thing on my priority list every single year at income tax time is school books so i started looking i was already used to with the backup they had switched to where like you would have test book which also required pesky then they would have a separate book for quizzes which also required a teacher key then they had an activity book which also required a teacher key then you had the actual book work and that teacher key so you had eight books for one subject i was like okay it's worth it it's fine then you get into the curriculum and these were not like out of date i start with my oldest i would always buy the most up-to-date editions of the books and i got part way through the curriculum last year and was like okay it's worth it to have all these extra books it's fine a little more hassle we bought a separate filing cabinet just for storing teacher keys test books all that it was fine then we got to the point where it was like hey you need to go to your library and look this up in a physical copy of an encyclopedia i was like okay that seems really old school nobody's really doing that anymore i literally took her to the library the next day and the library was like nobody carries physical hard copies of encyclopedias anymore nobody do you want to know why and so they pull up the library website where there's a link to world book not only is there a link to world book there is a world book for elementary school kids rule book for middle and high school kids world book for college students and then just in general world book i was like why did i even need to come to the library to look for a physical hard copy of a book when it's something that would have taken like five minutes to look up on a website even less than that so my first thing was okay this is a good curriculum this is a good curriculum it's teaching my kids they're doing great and then i started adding up the cost right now so if you don't understand homeschooling there's accredited and there's unaccredited accredited is you're going through an academy and technically that academy is the one teaching your kids and unaccredited is the parents are teaching it's also called parent-led parent-based versus academy so that's kind of like what we're so but we do unaccredited because i didn't see a point in doing accredited all the way from kindergarten to eighth grade when actually high school is the only point that it matters and you can graduate with an unaccredited diploma and still be able to go to community college trade school whatever and it was like an extra two thousand dollars per child i was like i'm not paying two extra two thousand extra per child just to have a different diploma when they can still have a diploma and still go to trade school or college if they wanted to but then i started adding up the cost of the books for rebecca and this was february i usually start in january february while schools kick back up they're doing work and literally one day while i'm sitting down to do all this my seventh grader again keep in mind seventh grade not like college prep high school class my seventh grade middle schooler had to do three whole college college-ruled pages of vocabulary words and most of them were not on the tests that they were doing this for i was like why are they doing this why why are you spending this much time with vocabulary words and then like most of this isn't even on the test you're telling her to study this what is the point of this so she's trying to do that i'm frustrated i'm just like okay just do it we'll look over in a minute then i gotta look up her books for next year and it was in the hundreds of dollars for her school work for eighth grade i said there's there's no way there's gotta be a better option to this and so i started but i started looking more and more in the back i'm like i'll give them another chance maybe i can just buy some teacher keys second hand it'll help cut down on the cost literally just for my eighth grader for just the books not even just the teacher keys just the books it was gonna be double what my other two were gonna need for school i was like that this is ridiculous then i started looking even more they're like oh we redid the science curriculum two books two books for science then each book had a test book and a quiz book and teacher keys for each of those so now we were up to over eight books for one subject and each one of those books was like 5.95 for the test books in like 20 or 30 something dollars for the kid books i don't even remember i don't even remember because i actually didn't even go all the way through buying it i said there's got to be another way literally you can call it circumstance provision whatever you want to call it a friend of mine at church was like hey i'm selling all my becca books i'm not using it back anymore i'm like okay tell me why because i am extremely frustrated with a becca right now i said i'm tired of spending so much on books the books are outdated massive amounts of books so much book work so much which feels to me like wasted time i wanted to be hands-on with homeschooling and none of this was hands-on it was all read write read write and i hate that i hate that way of learning i wanted my kids to have more time for hands-on and she goes have you ever heard of alpha omega i said new and she said that's what we're swi that's what we're looking at and she said so here's the deal you actually can try alpha omega their monarch program which is all online and all digital for free like there's no way she's like yeah you can try it for free for 30 days i was like okay i'm gonna try this i said but how would i know if my kids actually are gonna be you know apples and apples with a new curriculum she's like well there's a placement test it's like okay sure so i go on the website literally like that i had all three of my kids in placement tests they finished them in 30 days and it spaces them out so it starts them at two grades below where they are and then you step your way up my kids instantly loved it even with just the test because there was some things on the test that like i started finding out a becca never taught stuff that my husband and i were like what how does my child not know what a negative number is how does my child not know what a number line is how does how do they not know this how do they not know what the square root is how do they not know what a squared number is how do they not know how to go to a website and give the mla format for that research oh yeah because they still wanted them to use encyclopedias and it was so sh it when i first started back or off omega i was like how did i miss all of this i had somebody tell me and i had a dear dear friend sit me down and he said look you were doing the best you could you were going off the information you were given and you were doing the absolute best you could just because you find a better way later doesn't mean that you were wrong to begin with and i looked at that advice and i said okay i can accept that rebecca is no longer working for us it's no longer the curriculum that is perfect for our family and we will honestly we looked at it we're like i am perfectly fine with my kids doing all their work virtually because i feel like we live in a virtual world and they're not going to want you to sit down and do a four-digit division problem on paper for a job they want you to learn how to punch that into a calculator and they don't want you to sit there and know how to do a four-digit number into a calculator and not know how to bring a negative number to a positive when balancing books so we've looked at it and we're like okay let's do it so we started we literally just stopped completely with a becca from that point and then in april we actually started monarch i started the other two on the grades they were on my youngest we had actually looked at maybe bumping up a grade come to find out that a lot of stuff that monarch expected her to already know a lot of this she didn't already know how to do she didn't know how to type out a report in monarch and then send it to me she didn't know how to do any like the basic skills that i would consider for like virtual learning and virtual computer use so we ended up just leaving her in fourth grade and going from there basically that's the basic reason why we decided to switch we felt rebecca was outdated we felt like my husband i personally went public school around here started going to virtual all the parents freaked they're like no our kids need to know how to use books the reason why i actually love virtual better is that i feel the information is easier to update on a virtual format and is more up to date so since we switched from rebecca some of their life skills have improved they now know how to do typing they know how to do research and proper research and reliable websites to use for research they know how to do cite their sources they have more free time they have more time for choosing electives they have more time to do chores and they have more time to just be kids the last year that we did rebecca all of my kids usually three out of five days a week sometimes even all week we're literally doing school from 7 a.m to bedtime and i felt like they weren't getting to be kids now i feel like my kids are actually going to be kids they're getting better content from their schoolwork they're learning more life skills and they're having more time to just be so that was why we ended up switching it actually had nothing to do with anything going on in 2020 right now it was literally we had had enough with outdated useless information not all the information rebecca was useless but i felt like some of the book information was useless so that was our reasons if you have any more specific questions about like a becca versus monarch anything else that we've noticed the math was the biggest one for me there have been maybe some other adjustments oh like for sixth grade science this year every other lesson it seemed like for the first month at least was science experiments hand-held science experiments and they stole the science kits to go with it so we were able to do that that was another big adjustment was being able to do a lot more hands-on a lot more fun projects like when rebecca for fourth grade was doing animals instead of like just coloring a worksheet well this animal goes with this she wanted to do more than just coloring it was actually build your own animal scrapbook from magazine clippings which thankfully we had those because i couldn't go pick any up build your own scrapbook and classify the animals on their scrapbook page she had so much fun with that so a lot more hands-on a lot more like i said real world it feel i don't know how better to explain it to me this curriculum feels more real world than a becca debt it feels more like actual learning of things that they need to know versus just dumping information on them if you have any questions specific questions about either rebecca or monarch let me know in the comments below thank you for leaving or thank you for letting us know that you wanted this video thank you for watching if you have any more suggestions for videos let us know we're mostly home right now until maybe those holidays i don't know we have no upcoming travel plans because of current things going on so let us know if you have any suggestions videos below thank you so much for watching and we will see you next time

Channel: This Homeschooling Adventure

Views: 14,043

Keywords: this, homeschooling, adventure, #thishomeschoolingadventure, family of 5, vlog, vlogging, lifestyle, vacation, travel, family, homeschool, large family, #homeschooling, #abeka, #monarch, #alphaomegapublishers, #monarchhomeschooling, alpha, omega, publishers, publishing, pensacola, school, schooling, education, home, based, review, we're, switching, switch, change, learn, math, science, hands-on, learning, teaching, teach, parent, led, favorite, like, dislike, dis, dis-like, a beka, a-beka, preference, prefer, real, world, study, student

Id: kH1_XBSS3pQ

Length: 12min 15sec (735 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 18 2020