Time4Learning Review

I've been promising to do some curriculum reviews, so here's my first try.  Over last summer, I spent a good deal of time thinking about how our first few months of homeschooling went and how we should proceed.  Of course, this meant spending hours and hours looking at curriculum options online.  Curriculum shopping can be very addictive.  Math books are like crack to us homeschooling moms.

Anyway, I wanted to try something more structured and I was hoping to find something that would allow the Boys to work more independently.  I found Time4Learning.  A complete, online curriculum for K-8, covering Math, Language Arts, Science and Social Studies.  Each lesson has an animated instructional video that your kids can watch and then a quiz.  Most of the videos are funny and a little campy, but some of them (that are obviously older) are pretty cheesy.   The explanations are very clear and my kids had no trouble understanding or following any of the content.

There are many advantages to this curriculum.  It is complete and follows most state standards.  If your child is old enough (as mine are), they can work independently.  All your planning is done for you, as is all the grading and record keeping.  The cost is very reasonable for a full curriculum - $19.95/month for the first child and $14.95/month for siblings.  One of the best things is that you can cancel at any point, so if it's not working for you, you're not out any more money.

Another advantage is that you can use different grade levels for different subjects.  Both of my boys are summer birthdays and so they tend to fall between grade levels.  They are way ahead in History and Science, but are either at grade level or even one grade level below in Math and Writing.  T4L allows you to decide which grade level you want each child to be at in each subject, and then you are given access to the grade above and below that level.  This really allows your child to work at their own pace.  And isn't that one of the greatest things about homeschooling?

I had no intention of using it in such a way that my boys would be sitting in front of their computers for several hours every day.  They were able to complete their Math and Language Arts lessons in about an hour to an hour and a half every day.  We usually do Social Studies and Science together with lots of hands-on activities and experiments.  So I continued with what we were studying and used the T4L lessons as a supplement when we needed them.  I found the Social Studies and Science instruction to be the weakest in T4L.  At the 5th and 7th grade level, it was either just text from a book or some older animation that I found to be very poorly done.  The narrator character had a very high-pitched, nasal voice that was hard to even understand.

This whole set-up is such a great idea, and there's really nothing else out there that covers as much as T4L does.  I just wish it was done better.  What it came down to for us is that my Boys got really sick of the campy animation and bad jokes.  Listening to that every day was making them dread doing their lessons.  My feeling is that this is a better fit for younger children.  I also think that relying on it for everyday instruction is just asking to get burned out on it.  It can be an excellent spine to keep you on track and keep records for you, but I would recommend mixing in lots of other activities.

If you have middle school kids, I highly recommend Learning.com and their Aha!Science and Aha!Math programs.  You get the same advantage of having instructional videos, but they are much less campy and silly.  In addition, they are more interactive and also have games and quizzes for each topic. The quality is just way beyond T4L.  And the price is spectacular - $15/student/year.  They also have tons of other curriculum available, some of it is free.  I use the Aha! lessons, along with BrainPop to help cover the material and then we add in plenty of activities, projects, documentaries and field trips.  Now I'm just waiting for them to come out with Aha!Language Arts.