Homeschooling for 3

The Mathletics program is  an awesome way to inspire kids to take their mathematical skills to the next level. It allows your children to practice their math facts through a series of games. Each game is designed to motivate children to work on their weaker math skills while racking up lots of points practicing their best math areas. My daughters really liked the “shopping” aspect of the game. Although seeing top scores can sometimes motivate her to try and top the high scorers, earning points to go shopping and add accessories to her avatar was a true driving force for her.

Parents benefit from this program because each week you’ll get a progress report on how your children are doing. In addition to this you are able to change the settings if you think their current workout is too easy or too difficult for your child. For example, Jade rapidly ran through the math that she already knew. So, she would go and do her math, but only pick one or two of her more challenging topics and spend the rest of the time breezing through the easy stuff. And since I wasn’t standing behind her she thought she was safe. Imagine her surprise when I “retuned” her workouts to minimize the number of “easy” topics for the ones that she needed to work on.  (LOL! Yes, I am an evil mommy!)

I also like the international scope of the math games. 3P/Mathletics has programs for a variety of countries including South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom and an International option for other countries that aren’t listed. Sometimes when I’m teaching the kids I’m not sure if they understand that they are not the only ones being made to “suffer” through their studies. Seeing that children all around the world are being “tortured” made my eldest daughter feel a little better.

I didn’t get a password for my younger daughter, but we did explore the Australian math section for younger children. It was very colorful and interesting to see how other countries introduce math to their little ones. Actually when Jade got frustrated doing her work she would sometimes switch over and give herself a mental break by playing the games. Alaya had a lot of fun playing with the measurement games and seeing all of the “exotic” animals that we had to measure. For Alaya, an animal lover, this was a nice bonus.

Although I chose to officially test Mathletics on only one of my children, you can setup subscriptions for each child and use Mathletics from kindergarten to eighth grade.  An annual  12-month subscription  costs only $59 per student and comes with a 10-day money back guarantee if you’re not happy with the program. I really doubt that there is any parent who would not appreciate the extra help when it comes to developing strong math skills in their children. And when you consider that Club Penguin costs $60/yr. just to play games, you can see that this is a very competitive price.  And, I almost forgot to mention that if you can guess the human calculator’s favorite number of the day the subscription price drops to $49.95/yr.

My children have used a variety of websites that have are designed to help make drill exercises more interesting. Mathletics is one of the best that we’ve used. There are many incentives to continue practicing including earning certificates, going shopping with a little international competition on the side. My daughter enjoyed creating her avatar (with accessories of course) and was comfortable using the interface. Her one complaint was that the variety of games could have been improved with some math mysteries that would have to be solved in an allotted amount of time and if there were a few reward videos where the main characters tell a little story so that you felt like a real part of the Mathletics world. Aside from that observation from my “gaming girl” our experience was a positive one.

So, the Khalid Kids rate Mathletics a 4 out of 5 stars.

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