Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Time4Learning, A Continuation

I posted last week about getting started with Time4Learning. I have a few more thoughts now that we've jumped in. I'd like to discuss what my children like most about Time4Learning...the Playground!

The Playground is an area where your student can kick back and play games after doing some of the more academic activities. Of course, this is the favorite part of the program for my kids!
As I mentioned earlier, we used Time4Learning for a few months last year. At that time, my youngest had not discovered the Playground. This time around, being older and wiser, he found that area shortly after the first log in.

Time4Learning automatically sets a default of 15 minutes of lessons for 15 minutes of Playground time. This might be fine for younger kids, but I didn't want my kids to spend half of their time in the Playground area. Changing the time allotted on the Playground was easy. I simply signed in, clicked the parent icon, and changed the settings for 30 minutes of academic time to 10 minutes Playground time for my younger. For my oldest, I changed it to 45 min/10 min.

There is a timer in the corner of the screen that shows how much longer the student needs to work on lessons before being allowed to go to the Playground area. I have to admit, even though my kids have plenty of computer games, the whole idea of earning the right to play on Time4Learning has been motivated.

In my next installment of this review, I'll discuss the actual learning aspect of the program. Stay tuned...

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