Math Mini Courses ~ Review

My daughter has been polishing up her math skills with Math Mini Courses from A+ Interactive Math.

We were given access to the Time and Multiplication mini courses in order to complete this review.

What Are Math Mini Courses

They are exactly that, mini math courses and are a great way to help with math learning gaps. If you notice that your child may be struggling in just one small area then a mini course directly related to that area may just be what you are in need of.

For example I knew my kids needed a little more practice with telling time so we've been using the Time Math Mini Course, along with Multiplication as that is where my daughter is at right now.

The Time mini course is 20 multimedia lessons, whilst the Multiplication mini course has a total of 13 lessons. Every mini course also includes an assessment at the end of each lesson.

Whilst the lessons can all be done completely online via the multimedia video lesson format, if you choose you can also print them out via pdf, along with worksheets, tests and report progress sheets.

How We Used The Mini Courses

My daughter chose to do these courses solely online, so she logged in, chose the course she was currently working in from the dashboard area of our account and launched the multimedia video lessons.

Each course is contained within a folder which needs to be expanded to see all of the mini lessons that are to be completed.

Once a lesson is opened up it begins immediately with a friendly voice over and simple animations to explain the concept through a brief video based lesson. Each lesson is only a few minutes in length and it moves directly into the assessment questions at the end.

On completion of a lesson the user or the parent is required to mark the lesson and the assessment quiz as completed, along with the scores in the quiz. The program does not do this automatically and lessons will sit uncompleted until their status has been manually changed.

This is a simple system to use and was very easy for my daughter to jump on and complete a lesson in a few minutes.

The time lessons cover the following concepts days, weeks, months, years, seasons, second, minutes, digital, analog, hour, half hour, quarter hour and five minute intervals, duration and units of time, converting digital and analog, elapsed time.

The multiplication lessons cover these concepts, introduction to multiplication, multiplying using objects, a table and tricks and multiplying with 2, 3, 4 and 5 digit numbers.

What We Didn't Like

My biggest concern with these lessons is that we continually forgot to mark them as complete and I don't quite understand why that wasn't built into the system as an automatic feature. It seems like it makes extra work that would be unnecessary if the system could simply mark it complete once the child got to the end of the lesson.

This process also wasn't shown to us so it was only by trial and error that we found we needed to mark lessons and assessment quizzes as completed.

What We Did Like

I love the concept of mini courses for math, it is a great idea and certainly one that would fill a need with many families. The courses are affordably priced, starting from just $9.99 US dollars which gives you access to the course for an entire 12 month period.

Given that our Time Math Mini Course only has 20 lessons we can revisit during the year to be absolutely certain all of the concepts have been learned.

I really like the multimedia component and the fact that the child does not need to complete worksheets if they don't want. But the worksheets are available for those that want them or need the extra practice.

Looking Ahead

My daughter will absolutely be completing both of her mini courses and will no doubt revisit them again over the coming year.

I've got my eye on a couple of the upper level courses for my son, especially the probability and statistics mini course. I think he would enjoy that one and it will help to hone his skills in that area.

Pricing & Details

As I mentioned above the mini courses are reasonably priced, starting from $9.99 US dollars. To see all of the math mini courses available visit the A+ Interactive Math Website.

To see more from them you can also follow along via your favourite social media outlet

 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/APlusTutorSoft
Twitter:      https://twitter.com/aplustutorsoft
Pinterest:   http://www.pinterest.com/aplustutorsoft


I hope you have found this review helpful. If you would like to see further reviews of the various Math Mini Courses, from members of the Schoolhouse Review Crew, please visit this link.

Happy Homeschooling,
Kylie

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