Time to review Time4Learning

Our month is up, and it is time for me to review Time4Learning.

First I should say, that both my children enjoyed the curriculum. Sitting down to work has become easier, because in each subject you learn by watching comic figures in real life situations... and they were kept age appropriate.

Each session is kept short, and the subjects are explained well, plus, as the parent you can print out accompanying Learning Extensions. Those are worksheets you can use while doing your online work. It is easy to find your way around the website. The children needed a little help the first time they sat down to work, but after that they logged in all by themselves and did their work independently. (BIG PLUS!)

At the end of each session you get to do a quick test of 5 questions. This is where both my children got frustrated. Instead of getting short answers such as "You are correct", each answer was a repetition of the questions. So it would say something like. "C is correct. 5/8 of the cake are covered in sprinkles." (I'm making up the answer, because I can't think of one.) You cannot skip the long answers, and to my kids this was "annoying", as they put it.

What I appreciated about the program, was that you could choose between grades. For instance, if you sign your child up as a third grader you also get the 2nd and 4th grade material to work with. Unfortunately Social Studies for 1st and 2nd grade was so short, that my son finished them in less than two weeks. He really enjoyed this subject a lot and was disappointed, when he was done. Of course you always do have the option of telling Time4Learning to move your child up one grade, which, should we decide to stick with the program, we will do for sure.


Just one thing truly frustrated me. The program does not work on the latest version of Firefox. I called Time4Learning, and while the lady on the phone was very friendly (thank you), all she could say was to downgrade our Firefox, until they update their service. This is of course not an option, as the previous Firefox has pretty severe security glitches, and we will absolutely not downgrade. So we ended up having to use just one of five computers in the house. That of course meant, the children could never work at the same time. I do hope this will be fixed soon, so we can also work on the road, when all we have are laptops with the latest Firefox version.

When it comes down to it, Time4Learning is definitely a satisfying curriculum, but I will not use it solely for our homeschool year. Some subjects we'd like to cover in more detail, and so Time4Learning is a great basis. My daughter, for instance, enjoyed reading about the Vikings, but she wanted to know much more. She finished the Vikings in no time and then asked me to go to the library to pick up more books about them.

I would most definitely recommend Time4Learning to anyone, even if you don't homeschool. The lessons are presented in bite sized pieces, so sometimes 10 minutes on the computer are all it takes. And chances are, that your child doesn't want to quit after 10 minutes. My children have walked up to me with random historical facts or math problems they conquered online. You can't not love that.