Disclaimer: I received a FREE copy of this product through the HOMESCHOOL REVIEW CREW in exchange for my honest review. I was not required to write a positive review nor was I compensated in any other way.
Even though it’s not everyone’s favorite subject, we all know that we absolutely have to teach math to our reluctant students. For some, it’s something easy to teach, but there’s just as many of us who struggle to know where to start.
Recently, we were given the opportunity to review MathandAlgebra.com. To be honest, we were already working on a math course, and I wasn’t overly excited to review something else. We struggle with math a lot at my house, especially now that we are getting into pre-Algebra, and I honestly didn’t believe that anything could change that. So why start over on something else?
However, it wasn’t too long before this curriculum was pushing out the one we were previously working on and has become our new math program for the year! It is definitely one we are sticking with for the year!
My seventh grader has actually taken right to the videos. She loves that she can do this on her own and doesn’t have to sit and listen to me explain things to her. And I love not having to teach her pre-Algebra!
At the end of each lesson, there is a worksheet that she has to do to show that she truly understood the concept. If she does poorly on the worksheet, she can easily go back to the lesson and try to work out the problems that the teacher is doing on the video. She is usually able to progress fairly quickly, but there have been a few times when she has had to spend more than one day in the new concept. She wants to get it right, so she will go back again and again until she can finally see what they’re doing. I have helped her a little bit, but thankfully, she seems to be absorbing the information on the videos pretty well.
Here’s how it works: Once you set up an account for each of your students, they can login to their dashboard without accidentally getting their sibling’s work. There are four courses to choose from: Basic Math, Advanced Math, Pre-Algebra, and Algebra. Within each course, there are about 10-11 different concepts that are taught. Each concept has anywhere from 4-12 lessons and then a quiz at the end of each section. Each individual lesson has a video and a worksheet, along with the answer key to help the parent.
You can easily skip sections in this program as well, which I really liked because there are some concepts that my kids had already been working on with that first program, and I didn’t feel like they needed to spend any more time on them. So, we skipped ahead to the new math that they hadn’t learned yet.
Then there is my reluctant student. To be honest, I think the only thing that will make him excited about math is for me to tell him that he could skip it altogether! Which is why this curriculum was especially essential to his schooling. You see, the other program was also online and had all of the work online as well. He is extremely smart but also gets frustrated pretty quickly with anything that takes him too long to figure out. Well, he quickly figured out that if he got the answers wrong four times on the other curriculum, the program would eliminate all the wrong answers. He would have to go back until he got the problem right, but he would just skip ahead and memorize the answer. So, he wasn’t actually learning anything!
But with MathandAlgebra.com, he actually has to sit there and watch the video and then work out the problems on the PRINTED math worksheet. Now, this has definitely caused many tears, and I am having to sit down with him and encourage him through each problem, but I am slowly seeing him grasp the concept, remember what he had done the day before, and work out his answers. There are several review problems before he has to work on the new concept, and there’s always just one word problem at the bottom. When he takes his time and slows down, he gets most of them right! He’s learning!
I also love that I can see my kids’ progress through the website. Through the parent/teacher dashboard, I can track their progress, see their accomplishments, and print out their transcripts.
But I also love that each kid has their own interface as well. They can easily login to their account, pull up from where they left off, and see their own progress. And when they complete a quiz, they are given awards to acknowledge their accomplishments!
I am so thankful that we have had the opportunity to review this curriculum. I definitely will be considering paying for it for next year. It’s just $15/month or $99/year. I think that price is very affordable, considering all that is included with the curriculum!
This has been a wonderful math curriculum for our homeschool, but check out what the rest of the Homeschool Review Crew thinks:
katiecruicesmith.com 