Dawn
We're to our final few days of a month long free trial from Time4Learning.  I'd like to thank them for the opportunity to review their product and see how it really works before committing to it.
I learned a number of things this month from doing this.  One is that my youngest minion needs to be prodded, a lot, about his school work.  Some of that is the ADHD kicking in, some of it is that it's not fun for him without a specific purpose.  The older one though has really taken a liking to it, even to just go through the modules.  As a parent you can log in and see what your kids are doing, how long they spent on topics and what they are scoring on quizzes.

Screen capture of a history lesson - once on his own, once with mom.

Last week, the older minion had a dentist appointment in the morning, which when you have to take meds an hour before becomes a bit more of a chore than just picking up your minion and taking them. So he missed history that morning, but brought the homework back from class.  Lucky for us, the homework didn't match anything in the book and he was at a loss with what to do.

Even though minion #1 is autistic, we do not do his homework for him.  I'm not in the 8th grade, so why should I?  What we did find what that there was a nice little module about pre civil war USA in Time4Learning that matched up what they were studying that day.  We had to run through the material twice,(once on his own, I looked at the quiz, saw he wasn't getting the material, and then again with me) and do the quiz but he did learn it and was then able to do the homework on his own and understand it.  That in itself is a valuable tool and resource.  I couldn't be happier with that.  It also tells me that anytime he needs a little reinforcement, Time4Learning will definitely help.

We will definitely be keeping Time4Learning around as a resource and secondary learning tool.  As far as I'm concerned it's invaluable with an autistic 8th Grader.  As to minion #2, he thinks someday he'd rather be out of the classroom environment to learn.  He's not a big fan of the other kids (they really are bratty, mean, and generally bad mannered, so it's unsurprising) and chooses to not play with them or have much to do with them.  I can imagine it's a lonely environment for him anyway.  As weather gets cooler and we stay inside more, I'll be devoting more of my time to their studies (and my own if I'm lucky) so we'll see how things go.  Who knows, I may end up with homeschoolers yet!
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