Our 5 year follow up WiloStar3D Review

Online School — Homeschool

This WiloStar3D review is an update that readers have been asking about. I am sorry this WiloStar3D updated review was a bit delayed. We have spent time just enjoying the summer and finding our new normal since our daughter graduated. We do hope this WiloStar3D Review is of help to parents trying to figure out if this online school will be a good for for their child. This is review is from the heart and we have no connection to the school beyond our child graduating from it. We have received nothing for this honest review of WiloStar3D. We do not benefit in any way from sharing this with our readers beyond the joy of knowing we help other families trying to find the right school for their own children. While we are a Crunchy Family, we are also a Geeky Family, We wish there had been more reviews online when we had been trying to make this child ourselves years ago.

Our first WiloStar3D Review can be found here.

 

WiloStar3D Online School

WiloStar3D is an online virtual accredited school like no other. Picture the SIMS game as an online campus with online school rooms and desks and students running around as avatars learning and creating! As a homeschool mother had never sent her children off to public school but wanted to have trained teachers and an accredited program to help our oldest get to college with the least amount of friction, I knew this was a school we had to try for her and she adores the SIMS. As a geeky family we know the power the gaming and learning and that learning should be fun. Finding few actually WiloStar3D reviews in 2013 my husband and I decided we would test the school out for our daughters 8th grade year. If it didn’t work out we would then have to find something different.

Thankfully we didn’t have to look for another online school or brave a poor quality local school district for her education and things worked out beautifully with WiloStar3D.

 

What makes WiloStar3D different?

There is a fundamental difference in education that is both old school traditional and technologically modernly brilliant at WiloStar3D. Unlike most public schools and too many private schools, WiloStar3D doesn’t teach to test. Children are not stuck in desks focusing on book work from single sources with the goal of testing well for Common Core standards. In point of fact, WiloStar3D has not adopted Common Core. Like many homeschool families, I think it is too limiting and so much focus on it has caused children to not be well rounded. I do support the goals of Common Core, as this is an important topic for military children and others that move around the country and find because of that they end up with gaps in their education.

Having standards across the country isn’t a bad thing. However making it all so mechanical is potentially doing more harm than good. You didn’t though come here to read about my educational opinions. I will say though that one of the important reasons we choose to homeschool as a military family is because we wanted our children to have more stability as we know moving all over can cause many gaps.

 

WiloStar3D doesn’t teach to test!

If there is one thing that I think you should come away from this WiloStar3D knowing it is that this school isn’t like most in that Testing is not the goal. The goal is to help kids thrive and learn in ways that work for them! Unlike most schools the assignments and grades are not based on testing (beyond Math of course!) but rather most assignments are questions that help students find real answers, from multiple sources. Not just parrot back what they learned in a single chapter from a text book.

The studets get to learn about how their views are shaped by their experiences and how other students take different views due to their experiences. There were no high risk and high stress tests. Instead, there are papers, power points, and projects in a 3D world. Some kids showed off their art work to express their understanding of a subject. Some kids used games even! Other kids were very professional about their projects, some were humerus and down right goofy!

A Students talents and passions could be seen in their work and it was fantastic. I love my daughter joy at sharing how other students interpreted and changed an assignment and it looked totally different from her own. She had such pride when other students and teachers noticed and appreciated her showing off her geekery and goofery in her own projects.

 

This WiloStar3d Review I hope expresses that students here not just numbers…

With small class sizes, often just 12 or 13 and live classes being about an hour 4 days a week this gives teachers more time to work with each child’s strengths and needs. Students are not just numbers. My daughter felt heard and she didn’t feel like her creativity was used against her. Too often in public schools students are punished for simple things like writing in cursive below grade 4 for an example (though WiloStar3D starts at grade 6 but this is a common example), doodling, being creative with answers, and expressing their knowledge beyond the scope of a simple question.

 

My Daughter Graduated from WiloStar3D

If you have read our first review of WiloStar3D you will note that the biggest struggle for my daughter and some of the other students she had as friends was getting behind and catching up. This can be mitigated by parents though an I suggest you take a very active role in making sure daily work is done! I as Mom went back and forth with this. My husband and I thought that part of letting her do the adulting was getting the hang of deadlines and working on her procrastination and dealing with distractions. It was stressful for her at times. I think this is one of the reasons she is taking a gap year! She wants to be free of deadlines for a bit and get out into the world more.

Does WiloStar3D prep kids for college?

It did for some! Our daughters path is a bit different though….

The other reason for the gap year is that she plans to go to community college and indeed needs to. She never got the proper testing done and feels like there is more she needs to learn about college. While there is now a high school to college time line on the wilostar3D site, very little was told to us or our student. Pay attention to that timeline so you do not accidentally let doors close for your child. Talk to the teacher and Principle! Janet Hale was always happy to help and had I contacted her rather than waiting for information to be disseminated to parents I am certain she would have helped. We had gotten no info about it till after first review actually.

This is a ball I admit as parents my husband and I dropped too! I thought it was just us but at the graduation I noticed not many kids were going off to 4 year colleges right away. Many were going for community college. I wonder if like my daughter they were not told in those early years that 2 foreign language classes were needed. I know a lot of homeschool parents want an accredited program for highschool to help get their kids to 4 year colleges more smoothly, that was in fact one of our goals, but here we are….  Again, I can’t blame the school entirely for this. I wish there had been more communication.

Actual WiloStar3D Graduation

The actual graduation from WiloStar3D was like the school, virtual! Students, family, and friends of the graduates gathered around screens across the country. It looked like any other graduation, but virtual! The kids sat, the speeches given, the diplomas handed out, and the end celebrated! We hooked our daughters laptop to the living room TV so we could all watch. Yes, there were tears! The school had mailed out deplomas the week before and so we got to give that to her then as well. It meant a lot. It hardly felt “over” and some days I still find myself asking her, did you get your homework done? LOL She says she often feels like I need to be asking her that when I ask our other kids still! LOL How did the time go so fast?

I did record the graduation but as I did it in Facebook Live, I can’t export it and share here. If you would like to see it please send me a message and I can get you the direct link. It is 40 minutes long!

To celebrate and remember such an important day I had gotten our daughter a cap and gown and we took some photos after! Here are just a few of the many photos I made our daughter endure. She kept telling us how thankful she was that we got her this far. I kept crying. She has cousins and friends outside of school truly struggling, who didn’t graduate, and it touches her deeply. She wishes everyone could go to this school and in her words “have great parents that really care and can adult”…..

Goodness she thinks we can adult! LOL Oh dear, we still ourselves have so much to learn! I just can’t express how lucky we are to have such an amazing child, really truly, all the kids are special in their own ways and so very different from one another. Even with how different they are, I am betting they will do great in this school.

Graduation Day Photos

Crystal we will always be so incredibly proud of you! You have come so far with more challenges than more kids face. Military family life isn’t easy, having a parent with chronic health issues isn’t easy, having so many siblings to help with isn’t easy but you did it! You even managed to make it fun most days! I know the moving around has been heart breaking, it always made us a close family though. We will always be here for you! 

What are the WiloStar3D Graduates doing now?

Some of the Graduating kids from our daughters class are going right into 4 year colleges! Others the military, and a lot community college! Perhaps the mix looks more like the graduating class of public school? I thing sometimes with kids that have been home schooled that the world expects them to all be super geniuses. Do we feel like our daughter got the education she and every child deserve? YES! Despite us dropping the college ball (and perhaps that truly is what is best for her!) she has loved this school with a passion these last 5 years. She applied for her first job and no one batted an eye about the school or diploma that she insisted on bring them. She got the job that she is now fitting into her volunteer work and babysitting for military families.

Our daughter is considering college in the Spring now rather than waiting a full year. (this makes me happy!) She is saving money to take another glass blowing class this fall. She has WiloStar3D friends working this summer in STEM jobs and others taking time off before looking for jobs, some already in the military now!

 

Our Child’s future after WiloStar3D

So what does our Wilostar3D graduate plan as her career? After spending her entire life traveling a military child, so many moves, she plans to help other with finding homes. She wants to be a Real Estate Agent. Our daughter loves the idea of getting people into homes they will love. She also loves the idea of helping people settle down. We never stay in one place long considering military life and so I think the idea of buying a home to her is magical, a happily ever after dream.

I have no doubt she will reach her goals! We had always thought she would be some kind of engineer with her skills actually. Many of the other students are in fact going on to STEM futures and that makes perfect sense with this school too, but if this school teaches you one thing, it is that each child is different.

She is following her heart and not so much a paycheck. I have no doubt she will thrive at what ever she puts her mind to. She is one of the most amazing people I know. She is responsible, kind, thoughtful, strong, and for sure silly.

 

WiloStar3D is a safe school!

 

High School didn’t traumatize her…. she made friends. Teachers were on her side and yes, some pushed her to improve and she did! High School for her was everything a creative child in the modern world needed it to be. But for one thing…. and while she feels like she should have been better informed about the college path, she says she thinks it still wouldn’t have been for her. She says it is just smarter to get core classes done in community college first anyway. I can’t say she is wrong. As parents we have all these expectations and classes in this school really helped her develop who she is and what matters to her. That I don’t think is very typical in most high schools.

Is WiloStar3D right for your child?

I can’t know for sure, just that it was for our oldest daughter and we plan for 4 other children to go there too! It was a magical 3D world that is a safe and fun learning environment for students to thrive in. I have been asked if this school is good for children who not like to write by hand and it really is, as few things are hand written, truly that is rare. However if your child’s handwriting needs improvement….. talk to the teachers and perhaps that can be worked on. Talk to the teachers!

I am asked if this school is good for shy kids, kids who working on behavior issues, and so many more questions. When I think about them I almost always come up with the answer of YES. This school is so flexible! But some of my daughters friends left the school for different reasons over the years, some needed in person classes, some needed more challenging classes in their parents opinions, some of them came back to Wilostar3D. LOL

If you can’t get your child to go to the classes and do the work though…. if that is a battle you feel you can’t win, the school can’t fix that.

Certainly some kids thrive in this school, I say again, given other options our daughter always choose to go to WiloStar3D and is excited her siblings will too.

We have loved our daughters years at WiloStar3D and highly recommend this online school!

 

When our daughter gets to college we hope to share how that experience went as far as it connects to WiloStar3D!