Accelerated Achievement
Author: Paul Stone
Publisher: Accelerated Achievement
For more information or to order: www.acceleratedachievement.com

(I realize this is a VERY lengthy review -- this program encompasses 12 years of schooling, so there’s lots to tell!)

Accelerated Achievement is an affordable homeschool program that uses time tested instructional techniques that work, and provides 12 years worth of instruction in Language Arts, History, Philosphy, Economics and more. There is so much packed into this 1 CDRom! If you only used Accelerated Acheivement’s Phonics and Sentence Building program, you would be getting your money’s worth -- but don’t stop there! The materials used are carefully selected for quality and core values. I’m including part of the overview provided by the author of this program (with my own comments) below:

Phonics  -- Includes activities to teach: basic sounds of consonants and short vowels, simple letter blends, silent E, "Two Vowels Go Walking" Rule and many more…Over 900 Phonics Cards, on over 110 pages of materials. McGuffey’s Readers -- Based on solid phonics, seven volumes covering K-6 and proven for generations. Writing exercises. Integrated phonics instruction that teaches character and a love of God. There are hundreds of pages of excellent instructtion! The readers have lesson plans for you to follow.

Copy Work -- Our great grandparents learned to write by copying verses out of the Bible. Not only did they learn how to form their letters, but they had the benefit of learning ethics and strong morals as well. Building on this concept, this program allows you to browse and choose from quotes of great minds from the past, then print the quote on lined paper so that your student does their copy workon the same page as the printed quote.

Grammar -- The Grammar Game provided teaches the eight parts of speech. It includes hundreds of cards for you to print. It reminds me of other popular sentence building games for teaching grammar. The way this program teaches sentence structure provides hours of entertaining instruction.Also included for 4th grade and up:

Graded Lessons In English with over 100 lessons covering: Grammar, Sentence Structure, Paragraph Structure, and Letter Writing.For 6th grade and up:

Higher Lessons in English with 168 lessons and over 360 pages. This resource provides a thorough examination of Grammar and Complex Sentence Structure. It prepares one to write a College Level Theme Paper.Spelling

For younger students, spelling words are taken from their McGuffey’s Reader lessons and from words they misspell when they write.  The program includes Word Lessons by Alonzo Reed, a complete spelling curriculum which utilizes many of the same word study techniques and philosophy as you find in other popular spelling programs. 286 spelling lists, enough for almost 8 years of school!

Includes a Spelling Diagram Chart! This helps the child dissect each word so they can see the phonics behind the spelling.

Vocabulary -- Divided into dozens of daily lessons covering root words, word stems, prefixes and suffixes. Lessons also cover Greek, Latin and Anglo-Saxon origins. Covers over 5000 words, and provides the key to understanding thousands more. This is probably the least user friendly resource on the CD -- I didn’t like the way the lessons are presented and feel it would take a lot of learning on the teacher's part in order to use this with her students.

Arithmetic -- For math, you will be printing math worksheets that walk you through basic math skills in computation. Each time you click on a worksheet, ie. ## + ###, the program generates new problems so no two worksheets will ever be the same! Of course you may also customize your worksheets and the program will also generate an answer key. The math concepts covered for K - 6th grades are: addition, substraction, multiplication, division, fractions, percents, decimals and negative numbers. The program does not teach the concepts, but merely supplies the worksheets.  This is an area where this program could use improvemen.  There is no guidance provided for when or how to teach important concepts normally learned during the elementary years such as:  telling time, money, place value, cardinal vs. ordinal numbers, roman numerals etc.

For 7th grade and up, the author of Accelerated Acheivement recommends using either Saxon or Abeka math texts.

History -- The Cd contains more than 60 history books, including: Chronicles of America Series (30 Volumes), ten Children’s History Books, four Books covering World History, and fifteen of America’s most important Founding Documents. With this program you will find accurate, not Revisionist History that teaches respect for the founding fathers and their sacrifices for us.

Also included, with instruction on when to introduce them, are classic books on Economics, Mythology, Literature and Rhetoric.

Accelerated Achievement has a very user-friendly interface. When you click on the Curriculum tab, you are taken to a screen with Instruction and Grade Level Buttons. There is also an Explore option and the whole CD is searchable -- a real plus when you’re looking for information about a particular person in history or a piece of literature. The author encourages you to use the library when possible to save on printing costs. Instruction is given for printing on half-sheets of paper when possible, also saving on printing costs. Some will not like the idea of doing so much printing, but when you consider the quality of the materials and the money saved from buying several different curriculums EVERY year for each child, I think you’ll find that the cost is really not very much at all!

Science is not included in the curriculum, though they do provide an Internet link to a complete Physics Course. It would be easy to build a simple, yet complete science program for the elementary and middle school years with the library and science lessons/activities found online.

There is a simple planning sheet for you to print, which will aid both you and your student. Believe it or not, planning with this program is easy, even for muliple children, since the texts used are broken down into individual lessons. The program is classical in nature and would definitely appeal to those who wish to follow the Classical Method. Others, like myself, who are less "schoolish" in their approach, will find plenty of uses for this program! The books used in this program are timeless -- and they’ve stood the test of time. If you want to build your children’s character and want a curriculum that helps lay a strong foundation in ethics and morality, then this program is for you. One could definitely provide an excellent education with this program alone- however, most will choose to use this with other resources to provide activities in history and science for younger students.

Writing, dictation, memory work and oral presentation are encouraged from the lower grades through high school. Each grade level is laid out so you know exactly what materials you will be using and those texts have lesson plans.

This program will make a great supplement to your curriculum no matter what your educational philosophy. There are many resources provided including flashcards, worksheets, sentence building cards and early readers, so you will have a large variety of interesting activities and writings for all grade levels right on one handy CD!

Making the Grade: -A
Cost: $99
Value for Your Homeschool Dollar: 9