Product Review: Time 4 Learning

If you don’t have children, check out our Recipe Index and take a look at some of the yummy recipes we have posted in the last year.

If you have children, today’s resource can benefit you regardless of which route you have chosen for their education. Time4Learning.com works for home schooled, private schooled or public schooled children, whether they are ahead or behind other children their age.

Homeschooling

I have two children, a kindergartener and a second grader. We homeschool. Due to some changes on the home-front and with our business, I needed an online, self-guided format to allow my kids to complete the core components of their school year. I went online and started researching our options. The resources I found, for the most part, where pretty depressing. Most online school options wanted $500-1,000 dollars per child and required a full year of classes. Opting out of certain subjects saved little money. Some do not offer Kindergarten, others looked like they were over-kill on the busy work. Honestly put, we did not have the option to spend $2,000 for four months of school. Plus, to complicate matters, my children are above or below grade some areas and some of the choices didn’t allow grade-level swapping.

I posted on my Facebook page and asked to see if anyone knew of a resource I hadn’t found yet, and several people mentioned Time4Learning.com. T4L is an online, pay as you go, you pick the grade level resource. The price was more than reasonable! Your children can work at their own pace. You choose which grade they are in, and they can work at their grade level, or work one grade above or below in any subject. It seemed like a great fit for our needs.

After looking it over, I decided to trial Time4Learning.com for a month. T4L has a page that covers their scope and sequence for all of their available grades. T4L has curriculum for Pre-K through 8th grade. It covers Language Arts, Language Arts Extension, Math, Science and Social Studies. We continued to do our handwriting, Bible and character studies and let Time4Learning.com cover the core subjects.

Public and Private Schooling

Time4Learning.com can act as a tutor for any child through grade eight. If your child is struggling with math or language arts, you can sign up for T4L and just pick the lessons they need for tutoring.

It is also wonderful for reinforcement of what they are learning in classes or a way to keep them from loosing ground during the summer. It’s a great way to give them some productive screen time instead of parking them in front of Sponge Bob Square Pants if you need ten minutes to make a phone call or thirty minutes to cook dinner.

Pros:

• The kids can work at their own pace.
• If a child doesn’t do well on a lesson, they can repeat it as needed until they understand the concept.
• They love the interactive format.
• I can instantly see their scores on the parenting side of the program.
• The program allows parents to see how much time a child spends completing a particular lesson. This was a wonderful feature the day one of my kids decided to just pick random answers so they could get through the lesson and move on to playtime.
• There is a complete curriculum guide for the parents for each subject.
• Pay as you go per month, very reasonable cost per child. Twelve months of T4L for both children costs less than the cheapest online curriculum I could find for one child for one grade level.  That’s less than a Starbucks habit per month!
• As long as we have online access, they can do their school work from anywhere without having to lug books around. This is great for the days we have to be at my parent’s house when my dad is sick. I don’t have to remember to pack books and they don’t spend the day parked in front of the TV while I take care of Dad.
• The lessons aren’t tedious and I didn’t see any busy work in anything my kids completed.
• Parents can print a daily, weekly or monthly report with scores. This gets big thumbs up for ease in record keeping!

Cons:

• There isn’t a way to assign certain lessons to a child for certain days or an easy way to lay out a full year without doing it by hand, on paper.

Really, I only found one con to this program. My only complaint is that you can not assign lessons in advance. If that feature could be added for the homeschoolers who use this program, I would be thrilled. I printed the curriculum guides, did the math to figure out how many lessons each child should do per day, then wrote out a schedule by hand. Not a travesty by any means, but not as convenient as I would like, either. As long as you can keep up with the paper you wrote it on, this will work fine.

What If We Need a Break?

Time4Learning.com has a vacation feature for $4 per month, per child where you can hold your account and allow it to go inactive. This feature is wonderful if you plan on going on vacation or taking a little time off from school during the summer or over Christmas. You can pick up where you left off without any problems and without loosing any of your records.

The Bottom Line

After one month on the program, we have decided to stick with Time4Learning.com until at least August, and we will probably use it for the coming school year. You can’t beat it in terms of value for the content.  My kids are happy and learning, I can see their progress and I know they’re getting what they need so they can finish their school year.

If you choose to try out Time4Learning.com, please tell them KerryAnn Foster referred you. We will receive a small reward for referring our friends to their service. We did receive one free month of service in exchange for giving an honest review of their product on our blog.

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KerryAnn Foster runs Cooking Traditional Foods, the longest running Traditional Foods Menu Mailer on the internet. KerryAnn has over nine years of traditional foods experience and is a former Weston A. Price Foundation chapter leader. Founded in 2005, CTF helps you feed your family nourishing foods they will love. Each mailer contains one soup, five dinners, one breakfast, on dessert and extras. You can learn more about our Menu Mailers at the CTF website. For a free sample Menu Mailer, join our mailing list. You can also join our forum to chat with other traditional foodists and learn more.