My two younger daughters and I have been trying out the online curriculum “Time4Learning”:http://www.time4learning.com for the past month. I had read about “Time4Learning”:http://www.time4learning.com in a review done by “Woolwytch,”:http://woolwytch.com/ last year sometime. The verdict thus far is that we really like it.
For help on this interview, I had each of the girls write their opinions on the curriculum in their daily journal assignment. The only things they could suggest for improvement were that they would like Bible offered as a subject (we use another curriculum for that, currently), and that not all of the subjects were as animated as others. What can I say – children! Overall they both really enjoy the curriculum. They both feel they are learning as much, if not more, than they were from their previous primary curriculum.
I have been homeschooling my children for about 15 years now. “Time4Learning”:http://www.time4learning.com is the most entertaining and fun curriculum of any curriculum that we have used (we’ve tried quite a few of them, too). I work from home, so independent learning is a big deal to us (as I think it should be, regardless of whether Homeschooling parents work or not). “Time4Learning”:http://www.time4learning.com is definitely very strong at independent, self-motivated learning.
This curriculum is still really new to us, but if I have to find one suggestion to make I would say that it is an adjustment to keep track of how much of each subject to have the children do each day in “Time4Learning.”:http://www.time4learning.com We basically executed what “Time4Learning”:http://www.time4learning.com recommends – we took the number of lessons in each section for the appropriate grade level and divided it by the number of school days for the year. This is not as organized as I would like it, since I am so busy anything that helps us be more organized and keep track of our assignments is a boon to us. However, this is a minor issue overall.
Some parents are concerned over having their children working primarily on computers. We have been using computer-based curriculum for the majority of our schooling years. I find that supplementing with handwriting and daily journal assignments, having them write out many of their reports, etc. long hand and doing other things like art assignments and physical education has been a fine supplement to computer-based learning. After all, in our current day and age, life is very much computer-based for much of our population. My husband, our other children and I, all work from home, using the computer, so I find that it makes sense that the children will also be doing their learning on the computer, as well.
For full disclosure, I’d like to make it known that I was offered to do this review in exchange for a month long free trial of “Time4Learning”:http://www.time4learning.com curriculum. I assure that their offer has not swayed my review of their product in any way, shape or form. In fact, my intention is to do follow-up reviews, to help truly inform those researching appropriate curriculum choices for homeschooling or supplemental learning for their children. I know I am a researcher, and I have valued many opinions of others when it came to making choices for teaching my family, so I’d really like to keep giving back in that way, as I have tried to do over the years.
If anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask here in the comments or just leave me a comment asking for private correspondence (all comments are moderated, so private requests will not be publicly posted). I appreciate and welcome all feedback and conversation about the “Time4Learning”:http://www.time4learning.com curriculum or anything else homeschool related. Our family has always been blessed by learning at home, so anything we can do to help educate, inform or support others in our local or virtual community is an honor and a privilege.