Little Homeschool on the Prairie: Standard Deviants Accelerate a TOS Crew Review

Last year, my family reviewed Standard Deviants Accelerate and their Homeschool Courses. I was glad to have another opportunity to review with SDA again. We have access to another full year of all of their courses.

Most of the classes they offer are for middle school to high school. They also have available 3rd and 4th grade class. Some of the courses they offer are the following:

Arithmetic - Grades 3+

Fundamental Math - Grades 4+

Earth Science - Grades 6+

Nutrition - Grades 6+

Algebra - Grades 7+

Biology - Grades 7+

Chemistry - Grades 9+

English Comp. - Grades 9+

U.S. History - Grades 9+

AP Biology - Grades 11+

AP Chemistry - Grades 11+

AP U.S. Government & Politics - Grades 11+

AP U.S. History - Grades 11+

AP Eng. Composition - Grades 11+

The cost depends on how many courses you choose. They have a monthly cost per student and course of a lifetime option for all the courses. As you can see they have a nice variety of courses available.

SDA is an online curriculum supplement for your homeschool. You will need internet connection for these courses. Each student enrolled in the courses will also need a separate email account.

Recently, I had a change in my main email but, I only have so many emails available for my kids. It caused issues trying to get my account set up since I couldn’t get my kids connected due to the fact that their email was associated with my older email account and it wouldn’t let me sign up for another yearly subscription or update my student’s accounts from the previous year. That being said the customer service were extremely helpful, friendly, and professional.

After you get all the accounts set up you will see 5 tabs for each lesson. Which are video, vocabulary, Diagram, Quiz, and Written Answer.

Each video is around 10-15 minutes in length. The video has several different individuals with a personality that makes learning fun. They get a bit silly and my kids love it.

How did I use Standard Deviants Accelerate for our homeschool?

This year we worked on Biography. Little Man is 4th grade and Bug is 7th grade.

Bug also wanted to review the Nutrition class again that we did last year as we didn’t get a chance to finish it. Bug wanted to go over a few prior lessons she did and then she started back where she left off. I wasn’t going to discourage her from reviewing again as she struggles in this with her disabilities. Due to her special needs I had Little Man help her through the diagrams and quizzes.

A typical lesson we would watch the video clips and worked on the diagrams. Then my kids worked on the quizzes. We did courses several times in the week. I would print out each section and have a hard copy for my records. There is a note taking feature in the courses which is a nice feature. We really didn’t use this feature but, I can see that this would be helpful for older kids.

The kids enjoyed it enough that they would dabble in other courses. Little Man liked watching the history videos but, he didn’t do the diagrams and quizzes.

Final Thoughts

SDA has some nice features. I appreciate that you get feedback instantly on the quizzes. The grading is automatic and you can see progress reports, rubrics and grading.

Customer service was very helpful and walked me through the problems I encountered. I appreciate good customer service.

I still don’t like all the steps for signing in. Nor am I still keen on needing separate email accounts. I thought that part was too complicated and confusing. Thankfully they have a helpful customer service.

It covers many high school courses and AP courses to help prepare for the AP test. I am a long way from high school.

SDA makes me realize that there are options out there for when my kids will need reinforcement in certain subjects for teaching middle school and high school. As a mom and a homeschooler teacher this makes me feel confident that in the future I have good quality online homeschool programs right at my fingertips.

Stop by the other Crew blogs and see how they utilized SDA in their homeschool.