Miacademy is a subscription-based, online platform that offers lessons for kindergarten through eighth grade under the headings math, social studies, science, language arts, and electives. Parents can select from all content to create an educational program for their children and switch grade levels for subjects as needed.
Each child needs his or her own account, but Miacademy offers discounts for siblings. A parent account is included with the student account, and you can supervise more than one student from one parent account.
Note that Miacademy is very similar to two other MiaPlaza websites, Clever Dragons and Always Ice Cream. Miacademy is for both boys and girls, while Clever Dragons is for boys and Always Ice Cream is for girls.
MiaPrep for high school is accredited and offers complete courses.
Subject Areas Covered
Miacademy might provide your core curriculum (if you supplement it) or be used to supplement other resources. The site is continually being expanded with additional content, but as they explain on the website:
Many families are using Miacademy as their core curriculum. Nonetheless ours, like every other online curriculum, has areas that are more complete than others. Thus, we recommend supplementing the lessons offered on our sites with additional learning activities, such as science experiments, reading and interpreting literature, and other activities that work well for your student.
Math and language arts are the most fully developed. The elementary language arts curriculum covers phonics, vocabulary, reading, writing, and grammar, while middle school lessons cover writing, reading comprehension, vocabulary, and advanced grammar. Handwriting is not included. Miacademy teaches phonics-based pre-reading and reading skills in kindergarten with their Learn to Read: Level A (revised in 2024).
Math lessons for the elementary grades use a variety of ways to teach concepts, including videos, verbal explanations, visual models, games, problem-solving, and real-life applications. By eighth grade, students solve problems that involve inequalities, functions, and factoring, topics typical and beyond those normally taught. Students can also use the program’s Dragon Racetrack game to practice math facts and gain fluency. All of this is good, but there are potential problems with the progression of the lessons since the lessons sometimes review very basic concepts at levels that students should already know well. Issues like this are being addressed as Miacademy releases revised versions of the math courses—revised Levels A and D for kindergarten and third grade are available as of July 2024. Some families use the math courses as supplements rather than as core curricula.
Science and social studies course material within Miacademy is not yet sufficient for complete, two-semester courses for all grade levels. Courses often take less than one semester to complete. Science for grades one through four includes general introductory courses. Three topical courses appropriate for grades five through eight teach earth science, life science, and astronomy. A new (as of 2024) Structures of Science course for fifth grade delves into physics, chemistry, and biology with lots of practical applications.
Many social studies courses are incomplete, although more units are being added all the time. There are four social studies courses for grades four through eight: U.S. History I, U.S. History II, Ancient World History, and U.S. Government. If you search all social studies options, you will also see partial courses for Beginning Social Studies 1 and 2, Intro to World History, U.S. Geography (a lot of content for this course), and World Geography. Most social studies courses beyond those labeled “beginning” seem appropriate for about fourth grade and above. There are quite a few lessons for the primary grades under the course headings, and you might select enough from different course headings to put together a complete course.
Many parents worry about the progressive content being taught through social studies classes. In Miacademy, the history lessons on native Americans and slavery have a slightly progressive point of view. For instance, the lesson on native Americans implies that our Constitution was primarily inspired by the participatory democracy of the Iroquois Confederacy without mentioning other sources of influence.
The electives include various courses for art, music, biblical studies (both Jewish and Christian), life skills, physical fitness, typing, computer programming, word processing, spreadsheets, computer-created presentations, and introductory foreign languages (American sign, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, and classical languages). The life skills course is very basic and might be used for social studies in kindergarten.
How the Lessons Work
Lessons are presented through video instruction, games, online practice exercises, and printable activities (often for multisensory offline learning). Each lesson is divided into three parts: teaching (through videos), practice, and assessment. Sometimes there is more than one teaching video, and there are generally several short sets of practice questions. If children miss questions in a practice set, they are shown the correct answer. The question will be repeated later in that exercise.
Assessment questions follow the same format as those in the practice exercises. While students are shown incorrect answers immediately in practice exercises, assessments are scored at the end. Students can retake assessments to improve their scores.
Lessons have quite a bit of repetition in the practice exercises and the assessments. Both exercises and assessments present the questions and their multiple-choice answers auditorily, a feature that might be especially helpful for some children. Some practice exercises allow students to click on a button labeled “Easier Level Please…” Features such as these, coupled with the grade level flexibility, might make Miacademy especially useful for students with learning difficulties.
Some lessons have printable activity pages to be completed offline. These might include worksheets that reinforce the video’s instructional content, instructions and components for games, hands-on science experiments, worksheets, and fill-in-the-blanks pages to be used as students watch the teaching videos—the latter, particularly for science and history lessons. Parents need to watch for the notetaking pages and download them in advance. Parents can choose which downloaded activities to use, especially since many require their interaction. Parents might be tempted to skip the downloadable pages, but they add important variations in learning activities.
Students are rewarded with virtual gold for completing online activities. The downloaded pages give parents suggested amounts of gold rewards for each completed offline activity. Parents can also award their children with gold for whatever they wish—completing chores, piano practice, well-written compositions, a positive attitude, etc. The My World area of the program lets students use the gold they earn to purchase virtual products.
Parental Controls and Information
Parents can customize the program to suit the needs of each child through their parent account. Since the content might be too easy or too challenging for students at their selected grade level, parents can preview the lessons on their child’s learning path and assign lessons from all those available by looking under “All Lessons,” then under each subject area. This allows customization but also requires more oversight than other programs that offer less parental control. The program is relatively easy to navigate, so students can complete much on their own once a parent has pre-selected the appropriate lessons.
Miacademy has extensive, customizable reporting features since it tracks student work and assessments. Parents also get a weekly email report on what each child has done.
With the parent’s permission, students can interact with the Miacademy community through games, communication, submitting articles for the staff-moderated Miacademy Weekly newsletter, and selling their own digital artwork to other students for “gold.”
Summary
Miacademy has sufficient content for most of math and language arts, but parents might need to make changes to the prescribed, grade-level lessons to best address their child’s needs. At this time, because of the unevenness in lesson progression and the incomplete courses for science and social studies, I recommend using Miacademy as a supplement rather than as your core curriculum.
