Earthy Mama: Standard Deviants Accelerate Review

Sunday, October 19, 2014

Standard Deviants Accelerate Review

Vendor:
Standard Deviants Accelerate

Product:
Standard Deviants Accelerate Homeschool Courses

Age:

8 and up

Price:
One student is $99 for a year, or $24.95 per month.
AP courses for one student are $14.95 per month.

About:
Standard Deviants Accelerate has the Standard Deviants Accelerate Homeschool Courses that is online based learning. Lessons are taught with videos with problems to answer as well. There is also an option to view the written transcript of the lesson. The program includes the following subjects:

Arithmetic

Fundamental Math

Earth Science

Nutrition

Algebra

Biology

Chemistry

English Comp.

U.S. History

AP Biology

AP Chemistry

AP U.S. Government & Politics

AP U.S. History

AP Eng. Composition

The course starts out with you watching a video. There is also a bit of humor added in to keep things exciting. Next tab is vocabulary where it helps go over the words from the video. It even helps you pronounce the words and hear them spoken. Third tab was diagram, where you drag and drop answers and it tells you if you get it wrong. The fourth tab us where the Quiz is for the section. You take the quiz over the information you learned from the video as well. The last tab is written answer. This one is not graded by the computer but by the parent.

A great feature to this program is that you can print all the work. This is great for those of us that need to keep copies of work or have a portfolio of work to show the state. We do not have to do this but I like to have it just in case.

How we used:

We used the program 4 days a week, Monday through Thursday. My daughter used the Arithmetic section. This was a good way to introduce subjects to be able to elaborate on them later in our studies. Most things she was able to catch onto easily and go through quickly but somethings it was just a good starting place. She usually spent about 30 minutes on a lesson. Sometimes if it was an easy section she would continue on with another.

You are shown all of the topics for the course and you are able to pick which one you want to learn and it is easy to go at your own pace. We had just started fractions and it was nice to be able to start on fractions with this program even though it was not first on the list. I think this is my absolute favorite part of this course.

Also we didn't really work to much on the other subjects but we did explore them some. One thing to remember is that this program is secular based and no mention of God or creation is mentioned at all in the Earth Science. That is good for those that may believe in using only secular but those that don't may want to skip Science and just do the other programs. Overall it is a great supplement and even though we don't believe in evolution we were able to skim some things in the Science section as well.

The only part of the program I didn't like was that we had to make a new email account for my daughter. She doesn't get free range of the computer as she is only 9. So that means I have to keep up with two emails while using this account which is a bit overwhelming at times, especially at set up of the course. After that then the email is not really a big deal but it would be so much easier just to use my own still. Though they have said they are going to work on making the set up process easier so maybe that is something to consider for the lower grades. I am sure if you have highschoolers they already have their own email so it wouldn't be an issue for them.

Overall great program and we will continue to use it this year to dive into new topics with my daughter.