Transitioning from Beast Academy to AOPS

We actually did this transition about a year ago, but I thought I’d post about it now that we’re a bit further along. The Kid had finished up Beast Academy 5, and was ready to move on. She really wanted to make it into Epsilon Camp (hopefully I’ll get around to another post about that later), which meant that she had a deadline to finish Algebra 1. Looking at the AOPS Prealgebra book, I found there was so much overlap between BA5 and Prealgebra that we decided to skip directly to the Intro to Algebra book.

Math-wise, this worked well. Most of the first few chapters were review, just as you’d expect if coming from Prealgebra. Format-wise, we had some struggles. Gone were the colorful, cuddly Beasts, only to be replaced by a wall of text. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why things were moving along so slowly when the math itself was not a challenge for my kid. She watched and loved the free AOPS videos. She understood the content. But everything was taking foooreeeveeer.

First, I had to model how to work problems in a notebook instead of a workbook. The Kid has always resisted writing her work down, which has been fine in the past because she was able to do it mentally. Algebra was the first time that writing it down became necessary for her. I sat next to her and would scribe 1-2 problems as examples, showing her to number the problem, write down the work, and box the answer.  She caught on to this reasonably well, though I’d still need to show her what might be helpful to write down with new problem types. 

But, still, it was taking so long. Much longer than could be understood by me given her previous math pace. I decided to see how she liked Alcumus, which is the free adaptive program by AOPS for online problems. She loved this system. She would work the problems on a small whiteboard, get immediate feedback as to whether her answer was correct, and if she knew the material then she could move on after only a handful of problems. She started flying through at the pace I’ve come to expect of her. I found the Alcumus problems to be mostly along the lines of the regular problems in the book, even with the challenge level adjusted up (which you can do in the settings), so I decided to also give her a small selection of the challenge problems, but I’d learned from watching her on Alcumus that this would go better if I copied them out so she was only seeing one problem at a time. There’s something about seeing a whole group of problems with no white space that seems to have been what was derailing her when using the book.

Back to the Epsilon Camp goal, her options to substantiate having completed Algebra were to take an approved online class or to take the camp’s Algebra test. The Kid decided she didn’t want entry to hinge on a single test, so we signed her up for the AOPS Intro to Algebra class. This would mean repeating several chapters, but she was ok with that to get to the eventual goal. 

So, she started the class. The online classes from AOPS are 100% text-based. No video, no audio, just text on the screen from the instructor and students for about 90 minutes. Those turned out to be a barrier for my daughter instead of a help. She found the format so unengaging that she was constantly answering a question, spacing out while waiting for the instructor to push the answers through, and then missing when they moved on because there was nothing except text scrolling on a screen to indicate it was time to tune back in. The workload was also much higher, but most of it did not add substantial depth. In addition to the relevant Alcumus sections, she needed to do about 10 other problems about the same level as Alcumus, plus one problem along the lines of a Challenge Problem, plus one writing problem. This actually meant she was doing far more problems than she was with me, but fewer challenge problems. The writing problem is an amazing aspect of the online class, and was definitely a worthwhile experience. For that, students have to solve one challenging problem, and write up a full explanation of how to solve the problem. The task of writing out the full thought process is one that isn’t usually given in math classes until much higher levels, and really stretches a student’s ability to mathematically. The writing problem is graded for both math content and style by actual people, who give both a grade and written feedback on the solution. 

The Kid did finish the class, because we knew the official grade would be helpful to her. However, I do not foresee her taking online AOPS classes in the future. Going forward, we’ll combine the books and Alcumus in ways that work for her.

Yes, we still read! (Books for 8 Years Old)

I used to write long book lists in the early years, back when I was actually the one choosing the books. Now, my daughter chooses most of her reading for herself, though we do still have a regular family read aloud time every night. (Well, “listen aloud” may be more correct than “read aloud”, as we’ve switched to mostly using Audible for this.)

Instead of listing everything we’ve read or listened to in the past year, I’m going to lost the favorites here:

The Apothecary by Maile Meloy

The Candymakers by Wendy Mass

Millicent Min, Girl Genius by Lisa Yee

Prydain Chronicles (series) by Lloyd Alexander

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau

The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall

One Crazy Summer by Rita Garcia-Williams

The Misadventures of the Family Fletcher by Dana Allison Levy

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly 

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park

The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart

Tuesdays at the Castle by Jessica Day George

Frindle by Andrew Clements

Wonder by R.J. Palacio

Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos (series) by R.L. LaFevers

Alcatraz vs the Evil Librarians by Brandon Sanderson

The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by Bryan Mealer and Wiliam Kamkwamba

I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai

Plus, The Kid reread the Harry Potter series about a million more times. That obsession shows no signs of slowing down!

Brave Writer and Michael Clay Thompson

Let's start with this: I did not intend to use two English programs. I definitely did not intend to use two English programs plus several supplemental pieces. But that's what I've ended up doing. I notice others doing similarly on various forums, but given that both of these programs are hard to wrap your mind around until you start using them, I thought I'd have a bit of a comparison post.

Brave Writer's strengths include its focus on creativity and language as a natural part of our world. It encourages Big Juicy Conversations, not just about books but also about movies and art and life. It encourages us to simply enjoy what we read without feeling the need to analyze it all. Brave Writer emphasizes how much our writing can be about the things that we naturally enjoy and are inspired by, and not necessarily related to traditional academics at all.

Michael Clay Thompson's program's strengths lie in the absolute joy it takes in academics. The love of academic writing and language comes through very clearly. He emphasizes that the most enjoyable reading starts with writing that is extremely well done.  Because of this, he focuses on technical grammar, classic vocabulary, and academic writing.

So, can you see what the likely weaknesses of each program are? Brave Writer can come across as almost anti-academic at times, and MCT's program feels as though it is almost discouraging creativity. They both start with a love of language, and they both eschew teaching/following formulaic writing methods, but they approach it from very different sides.

We don't try to use these at the same time. It would be far too much. We started with Jot it Down, and it was a light, fun introduction. The Kid wasn't ready to move on to Partnership Writing yet, but did want to know parts of speech, so I crossed my fingers (there are nearly no sample pages!) and bought MCT's Grammar Island. She loved that, and learned easily and quickly from it, so I picked up the rest of the Island level as well.

We continued on like this. When we would hit a point where we were getting restless with one approach, or finished one level but she wasn't ready for the leap to the next level, we would switch to the other one. They have balanced each other perfectly for The Kid, giving us a solid set of academic books, and a good number of creative projects.

Suppose the Wolf Were an Octopus

We piece together most of our curriculum here. It is the easiest way to meet The Kid's needs. One of the pieces I have loved for Language Arts and keep coming back to is this wonderful little series from Royal Fireworks Press.

The books are split by grade level (K-2, 3-4, 5-6, and 7-8), but they all follow the same format, simply using books more likely to appeal to each of those grade ranges. For example, the K-2 level focuses on picture books and early chapter books. The 7-8 version features books like Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and The Hobbit.

For each book, there is a total of 18 questions, 3 questions in each of six "levels". The levels correspond to Bloom's Taxonomy and the basic idea is that when you begin to work on comprehension, you would start with level 1 questions. As children become more adept at understanding and discussing literature, you would work your way up through the levels to more complex discussions. However, they include all the levels of questions for each and every book, so you would start with the book level that matches your child's interest level and/or reading level, then use the questions to adjust for comprehension ability.

The levels used in the books are:

1. Remembering: Basic facts about peoples, places, or things
2. Understanding: Often about why a character did something, using situations where the "why" was often explicitly stated in the text or is easy to discern
3. Applying: Questions that have the student apply situations in the book to their own lives - what would they have done if...? If you could interfere at any point in this story, when would it be?
4. Analyzing: examines information and situations in the book. There are a lot of "how", "why", and "what do you think caused _____" types of questions in here. 
5. Evaluating: Asks the students to make judgments about the books - was an action an example of courage or cowardice? How did a character apply their own sense of judgment and was it consistent with what they said about their morals? What was a character's biggest strength and biggest weakness?
6. Creating: These are invitations to rewrite the story, or part of the story. The series title comes from a question in the K-2 book, relating to Red Riding Hood: "Suppose the wolf were an octopus. How would the story change?"

We've used these books in a few ways, all of which boil down to helping me come up with more creative questions than I manage on my own. When The Kid wanted to learn how to write paragraphs, we used questions from these books to come up with good topics. She recently is tackling essay writing. We're using MCT's Essay Voyage as the main text for this, but find their assignments uninspiring, and she was thrilled to see me pull these off the shelf to replace the assignments. They cover enough variety of books that we've ever actually read just to match up with the series, we just find something in the list that she has read and enjoyed and wants to write about!

What Would You Like To Read?

I saw someone on a message board wondering what people would like to see in a homeschooling blog. The answer was honest, detailed reviews of curriculum. With so many blogs being monetized nowadays, the vast majority of reviews are from people who were provided a curriculum free in exchange for a review, and they may have only used it for a couple of lessons (if that) before posting about it, which makes for a lot of very enthusiastic, but shallow, reviews out there. I've also found this frustrating when I'm looking for more information, so I'll try to post a few more in-depth reviews, like my last post on Beast Academy.

I write this blog as a way to organize my thoughts and contribute to a homeschooling community that has been so supportive of us. What else would people like to hear about? What would be helpful or interesting to you as you read? More about curricula? Day-to-day details? (I warn you, they're pretty boring!) Organization? Giftedness and asynchrony? Something else?

Beast Academy Review

We've been all done with Beast Academy for several months now, and I don't think I've ever written any type of review about it. So, here I go.

Beast Academy is designed for kids who think of math in concepts instead of in algorithms. This is often phrased as "advanced math kids" but I'm not so sure that's the correct description. It is true that a lot of kids who think of math in concepts may be advanced, but they may also have struggled so much with traditional algorithm-focused programs that they are behind.

If you're not sure what it means for a math program to be focused on concepts, here's an example. When it comes to multiplication, an algorithm-based program will focus on multiplication tables and practice/memorization of them. A concept-based program will focus on what multiplication is (basically, an array) and how to move that array about so that the numbers can be easily manipulated. So the x4 tables aren't necessarily memorized, but they will be understood easily as the same as doubling and doubling again, or x5 and minus one of the numbers.

There are two books for each level: the guide book and the practice book. The guide book is a colorful comic in which a group of math beasts work together to learn new concepts and, eventually, compete in a math competition. We see the beasts struggle, we see them get problems wrong, and we see them figure things out by using each of their different strengths. This is excellent modeling for partnering with your child on the more difficult problems, and for kids to see how to struggle productively. All of the teaching is done in the guide books, and The Kid found these so fun that she took them to bed with her as reading material and still hangs on to them even though she's finished with the program.

The practice book is black and white. It often has a beast at the beginning of each section, and word problems will refer back to things in the beasts' world, but there is no comic format to the practice. A section of practice will usually start with a few straightforward questions and then move on to more challenging or puzzle-type problems. A common complaint I've seen about the program is that it does not have enough practice. We did not find this to be true; it had plenty of practice problems for The Kid. (The exception being in practicing multi-digit multiplication and division, for which I did supply extra practice.) There are excellent solution guides in the back of each book that not only give the answers but walk you through how to do each problem in a step-by-step manner. These guides make it possible for both mathy and non-mathy parents to use the program.

The books are challenging. We chose to use Beast Academy only about three days per week on average. The other days, we took a break and did less challenging math such as (easier) math puzzles, math games, competition math practice, reading mathy books like Sir Cumference, and other such things. At this pace, level 3 took The Kid about one calendar year to complete. It looked like level 4 was going to take about the same amount of time when The Kid suddenly accelerated her pace greatly and flew through the content of the rest of level 4 and all of level 5.

We love Beast Academy. It's a very strong program and gets more advanced with each year. Level 3 is mostly 3rd grade material with some more advanced topics. Level 4 is 4th grade, but adds in quite a bit of 5th/6th grade material. Level 5 gets advanced enough that The Kid was able to skip pre-Algebra and move directly into Algebra upon completion.

Brave Writer Materials

I feel as though I answer this question fairly often in other homeschooling spaces, so I'm going to put it here as well. I love Brave Writer. It's methods, structure, and lifestyle approach all fit The Kid and I pretty well. But their website leaves something to be desired, as evidenced by the number of questions about what all the pieces even are. So, here's my summary:


The Lifestyle: This is an all-encompassing term for the approach that Brave Writer takes. The program emphasizes that language is something that we live and breathe, not simply a school subject. The Brave Writer Lifestyle includes word play, art galleries, poetry teas, movie nights, and deep conversations alongside books and writing. These things can all be incorporated into a homeschool with no need for products, and are a great way to explore whether Brave Writer's approach is for you with no cash outlay. The best summary can be found by looking through the pieces on the left side of this Brave Writer page.

Setting up for a poetry tea

The Writer's Jungle: This is the original product from the company. It is a parent manual, and lays out the philosophy and road map for everything from pre-writing through high school. It is very much a "big picture" book, with fairly little implementation guidance, meant to guide people in creating their own custom language arts program in their home. If you want some guidance and to otherwise do your own thing, this is the product for you. Otherwise, I suggest you start with one of the writing pieces in the next paragraph and come back to this after you settle in a bit with Brave Writer.

The Writing Project Books: These are Jot it Down, Partnership Writing, and Faltering Ownership. Each of these contain ten writing project ideas, with ideas on how to implement them. Jot it Down is a bit different from the other two, as it assumes that the child is not yet writing, or is an emergent writer, and therefore focuses on the child learning skills such as ordering information, retelling stories, and beginning to express themselves in a logical manner with words, all while the parent is doing the bulk of the physical writing. In Partnership Writing and Faltering Ownership, the assumption is that the child is doing all of their own writing, with the parent providing encouragement and guidance. For PW and FO, most projects are meant to take four weeks, including time to select topics, do research, write, and revise. The program emphasizes that fewer well thought out pieces are superior to many rushed pieces of writing. I believe that the writing project books are the star of the Brave Writer program, and if you want to try just one product, most people should start with one of these. Each one spends the first half the book summarizing the parts of The Writer's Jungle philosophy that is applicable to that stage of writing, so they make an excellent place to jump in.

The Literature and Grammar Program: These are Quiver of Arrows, The Arrow, Pouch of Boomerangs, and The Boomerang. Each guide covers one book, has copywork/dictation each week for four weeks, and a literary topic/device to discuss. The newer ones (which you can recognize by their higher prices) are better formatted and include topics for Big Juicy Conversations (discussion questions). Grammar is taught through the copywork and dictation. These can be done in any order, and therefore I would encourage people to choose ones that correspond to books they are excited to share with their children.

The Online Classes: We have not done any of these, so I include them here only because I know they are fairly popular. Reviews on them consistently say that they are very encouraging, and the teachers are friendly, but that the feedback on writing is so encouraging that it doesn't have the constructive criticism that is often needed for writers to further develop. Therefore, I am under the impression that these are best for reluctant and struggling writers.

Note that I did not include The Wand in the listings above. We did not use it and I've been told it is very different from all other Brave Writer products, so I do not feel able to speak about it.