Power Homeschool – Is this the amazing curriculum you need?
Power Homeschool is the official provider of online Acellus® courses. This is for parents independently homeschooling their children without teacher support. It is a complete curriculum and covers Pre-K through 12th grade.
Power Homeschool’s elementary program offers a wide variety of online courses, taught by some of America’s finest teachers.
Within each Power Homeschool course, students learn concepts that build off topics that were taught in previous classes while preparing for more complex concepts as they advance through the grade levels.
You can select up to seven courses for your student, such as mathematics, language arts and reading, science, social studies, and electives.
PROS OF POWER HOMESCHOOL
- You don’t need piles of books and notebooks
- It’s completely mobile, so you can school from anywhere
- It keeps track of grades, scores, and attendance
- The video lessons are engaging for most students (though some beg to differ)
- It’s not cost prohibitive
- There are special education classes for students with learning disabilities. Power Homeschool also provides a variety of accommodations and supports for students with special needs, such as closed captioning and text-to-speech features.
- You can tweak what grade level different subjects are (you don’t have to do all one grade level)
- They incorporate Prism Diagnostics and Vectored Instruction so that your children receive personalized instruction based on strengths and/or deficits. This is their special feature.
CONS OF POWER HOMESCHOOL
- It is not very strong in writing activities. A number of parents feel that writing needs to be supplemented – especially for elementary grades.
- Fully online. This can be challenging for younger children, especially when handwriting and such skills need to be developed. It also means more screen time.
- There is no teacher support (but this is typical of homeschool curriculum, where the parents take the lead)
- If you want your child to repeat a lesson you have to switch over to Tutor Mode. This will not automatically move your child to the next lesson. You would need to switch back.
- If your child has graduated from a class, but you have concerns about mastery and want them to repeat the whole class, you would need to sign them up under another name in order to do that.
- No answer keys for quizzes and tests
- There is limited hands-on learning. Some subjects, such as science or art, often require hands-on learning experiences that can be difficult to replicate in an online environment.
COST
The cost of Power Homeschool is $25 per month per student. Each student can be enrolled in up to 7 courses at a time.
If they offer discounts for military or multiple students, they do not mention this on their website. I have heard some people say that there is a military discount but not a multiple student one. It is worth talking to customer service about this.
OTHER THOUGHTS
- Communities of Power Parents that you can ask questions.
- Samples of lessons available but they don’t really give a good scope of the whole program. There is no free trial. You can sign up for a month and then cancel if you want to fully check out all it has to offer.
- You can use the same curriculum through Acellus Academy, which is an accredited program (and does cost extra). Power Homeschool is not accredited.
- Not a faith based curriculum. For some this can be a turn off as it might mean having to skip or explaining lessons.
- Having to switch between Homeschool/Teaching and Tutor modes can be annoying, especially if you want to ensure mastery of a concept or lesson.
- Because the lessons are short, your child can move through quickly through the curriculum. (For example: if in a situation like a hybrid school where your child has 30 mins to work on language arts, they could easily do 2 to 3 lessons during that time.)
Is Power Homeschool right for you? It just might be.
If you are still looking, why not check out these other options:
Time4Learning
MiAcademy
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