CTC Math Homeschool Mom's Review

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I was sponsored by CTC math to review their comprehensive online math curriculum program and am excited to share my experience as well as an awesome giveaway!  All opinions are mine alone. 

A CTC Math review from a homeschool mom's perspective. 

CTC Math is an online, subscription-based math program for kindergarten through high school created and taught by Australian math teacher Patrick Murray.

These are a few features of CTC Math

• Learn at your pace, not somebody else's
• Stop and rewind the teacher until you get it
• 24 x 7 unlimited access when you want it
• You get unlimited access to all lessons, across all grade levels
• They offer monthly and yearly memberships. For one student or multiple students 

Each of the 1,400+ CTCMath tutorials lasts around 4-9 minutes and presents the concepts of the math lesson step-by-step

A few things I liked about the program

I liked the fact that the parent can tailor-make their child's lessons! You can assign tasks to each student. Basically, you can come up with your own lesson plan, let them know exactly which lessons you want them to do and in what order fi you chose. You also will receive an email with the report and when the task is due. Great for busy moms with multiple ages and grades. (I would sometimes forget what was due when and if they actually turned it in!)

You can decide how many questions or how many minutes you want for each lesson and if you want the questions to be easy, hard or evenly distributed.

Oh, and this is so cool! Parents are able to generate a direct URL for any lesson. (Pretty neat. Not sure when I would use it, but I like it :-)

Diagnostic tests will tell the parent what a student knows or needs to learn, but the program doesn't automatically prescribe a grade level or course based on the tests.

Great feature- The Question Bank Wizard allows the teacher to create printable worksheets. Students at all levels need to be familiar with paper-and-pencil math. Older students will need to do some paper-and-pencil work to solve complex problems in CTC Math. 

As for the student

Lessons are taught in small increments with plenty of practice on each topic. The program allows students to go back and repeat lessons or jump ahead to a different topic if that is helpful. Nice!

The student can jump into a lesson and use the diagnostic test as a pre-test or as a post-test. As pre-tests, you can find out if your child already knows a topic and can skip to the next grade level. You can also use the test as a final exam when a student has completed the lessons within that topic. The diagnostic tests are available for all courses up through Basic Math and Pre-Algebra.

Another feature I liked and would have used with my children is Speed Skills, online speed drills. Although many children do not like timed tested, I believe that learning how to take a timed test is important. There will be several situations in life that their knowledge will need to be shown with quick thinking. If they plan to take the ACT or SAT test, a requirement in the college admittance process, there will be timed tests, math included!

I like educational curriculum websites that are easy to navigate and understand...quick to learn how it all works and quick to get started. I am not patient or have time when it comes to having to figure out a new curriculum program. I had a house to run, children to teach..... you understand. So this was the big frustration I had with CTC math.

It doesn't give you instructions as to where to start. Now, take into consideration what I mentioned above. I like a program that is easy to begin. I am a patient person, but not with new computer-based educational programs. And I like to do things the right way. When I'm not sure what that is, it is a little frustrating. But upon reading some reviews, it looks like you just jump in and start where ever you want!

Everything else about the program looks amazing but trying to figure out where to start the program, where the best place was for my child to jump in and begin the program was not readily available.

CTC Math is a program that I would have tried with my children had it been available when I was homeschooling.

Because my youngest of four, all homeschooled the entire way, graduated high school last year, I had a friend try CTC math with her son and tell me what she thought.

The following is her review of the program.

"My 8th-grade son, who is a struggling learner, reviewed two days of the Diagnostic Tests, and the lessons that go with them for middle school math.  On day one, he took the diagnostic test first, without watching any of the lessons, because that is what we thought we were supposed to do.  He scored 79%, and then went back to watch the lessons covering the problems he missed.  At the end of each section, the instructor says, "Good luck with your problem set", so we figured that meant we should have watched each lesson segment before answering that set of problems.  On day two, my son watched the lesson set first, then worked to answer the set of questions/ problems after the instruction.  He still struggled with different aspects but did a bit better on some of the sets.  He likes the instructor's accent very much, enjoys watching the explanation and seeing how the problems are to be solved, with the ability to pause, or stop and rewind when needed.  This is very similar to the program we already use for our homeschool math, but we do not need internet access for our cd-ROMs.  I'm not really sure how the actual lessons differ from the diagnostic test, but each diagnostic test (I chose the standard one with 24 questions) was very involved, and took my son a long time to complete; even though individual lessons are short for the actual instruction time.  He was very discouraged when he would finish all his calculations and still get a red X next to his answer.  The green checkmark indicating correct is a positive feedback feature that tells the student immediately if their answer is right.  I imagine that the diagnostic tests could take weeks to complete if the student is doing every one of them for a level of math, so those might be good to give during the summer in order to assess actual grade level.   I'm guessing the website and electronic record-keeping would be helpful, but we didn't really observe that part of this program.  We did watch the tutorials, and listen to the testimonies of others using CTC Math."

Teresa V.  

I encourage you to try it out if you are looking for an online math program.

Get 50% off discount HERE (No code needed)

CTCmath Family Membership Giveaway ($148 value)!

Enter to win a 12-month subscription for the whole family! Hurry! It ends March 3rd at midnight!