Time 4 Learning - a TOS review

Time 4 Learning is an online, interactive preK to 8th grade curriculum that can be used for homeschool, afterschool or throughout the summer.  It can be used as your core homeschooling curriculum or be used as reinforcement to lessons you are doing or have done.  It is a complete curriculum in that there are lessons for math, language arts, science, and socials.  The lessons are interactive videos and games.  There are also worksheets that can be printed.  T4L tracks your child's progress and time doing the activities.  There is a playground area, which consists of links to educational sites, like PBSkids.org.  You can choose not to show the playground or to use it for reward time after doing a lesson.  You can set timers for how long the child must do lessons before going to the playground, and for how much time they may play in the playground before having to go back to a lesson.

When you sign in as the parent, you are able to view which lessons your child completed, which lessons were started but not finished, and which quizzes were taken and scores for those quizzes.

Time4Learning is $19.95 per month for the first child and $14.95 per month for each additional child.  It seems expensive, but if you consider that it can be a complete curriculum, the price makes sense.  Also, consider the cost of a single subject workbook and textbook and that will also put the price into perspective.

Our experience:

Who this is great for: a family with many kids.  One child can work on Time 4 Learning while other child gets one on one time with Mom.  I was able to get a little bonus J-jo time while Bear watched and did the lessons. The program is very independent.  The little animated lessons are short and kept her interest.  We especially liked the math lessons. Bear hasn't been keen on doing math lately but she readily asked for Time 4 Learning and always chose math lessons there.

I loved that I could have control of the educational level.  The language arts section was too easy when I placed her in first grade so we were able to easily (click of a button on parent page) change her to the 2nd grade level.  Similarly for math we were able to switch from Kindergarten to first grade.  It was great too, how T4L allows you to access lessons from the grade below and the grade above your child's current level.For Language Arts, we were able to have access to the third grade lessons and alternate between 2nd and third grade by clicking the level we wanted at the top of the screen.

 One thing that bothers me about the program though is that to enter the lessons a new screen pops up and asks you to click "here" to enter lessons once again, and then another screen pops up.  It was too many screens and my computer didn't agree with it sometimes. The picture below shows what I mean.

I still feel guilty putting my child in front of a screen to learn.  I much prefer her having that time with me. My favorite way to use Time for Learning has been during J-jo's naps with Bear sitting on my lap:)  However, with more than one child, that becomes increasingly difficult.  I still want Bear to learn to occupy herself in a constructive manner while I am busy teaching J-jo, and I don't want her to become dependent on a computer to occupy her time.  That said, if I am going to turn to the computer to occupy and teach my child, Time 4 Learning is a site I would recommend, especially if you want math and reading (and more), if you want the teaching/review to be done for you (as opposed to a site that only does practice questions), if you want the ability to change your child's grade level, and if you want to be able to keep track of their online learning.



Disclosure: I am a member of TOS and I was given this product free for a month for review purposes only. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. To see what other members of the Crew thought click the picture below.