The Curriculum Choice

Times Alive!

Jan 202012

Until the 2011 school year started both of my boys had been doing five days worth of living math lessons. I loved our time with it. This year, however, I decided to put them into Teaching Textbooks.

One of the things I used during our lovely Living Math Lessons was a programme called Times Alive! I found it rather by mistake while doing my daily blog hopping. Before I knew it I’d stumbled upon the City Creek Press website and was in total awe of their multiplication programme.

I confess, that despite my child being officially in third grade at the time and having an amazing grasp on a variety of math subjects from simple to complex I hadn’t branched out with multiplication yet. No, rather I’d been teaching him “groups of” with a fun game we’d been playing. After a quick chat with my husband about what funds were left in our homeschool budget I purchased Times Alive! and never looked back.

Times Alive! is not entirely unique as I know there’s another song and story programme out there for children to learn their multiplication facts.

How I use it:

We chose the download instead of the cd version of this progamme {remember we live overseas so downloads often win out for us!}. Each day I’d load up the programme. My son would happily listen to the story and song and then do a quick and simple application test proving he understood and fully grasped what he’d learned.

The programme starts with 2’s and skips 1’s and 0’s. Not a huge deal for us because I’d all ready taught him his 0’s, 1’s, 2’s, 10’s, 11’s, and we were working on our 5’s.
There aren’t stories for the 2 family. Rather there’s a teddy bear who comes on and shows that by counting by 2’s you can easily find the answer to any problem you need. Simple.
There are stories for all your 3 facts, 4 facts, 6 facts, and 8 facts. For the 9 facts there are clues on how to get the answer quickly. These clues are as great as the stories. I can always hear my kids working out 9 facts if they’d forgotten the answer! Again, none for the 5’s, 10’s, or 11’s. Wasn’t an issue for us, and I really believe that it shouldn’t be an issue for anyone.
We loved some of the stories and were constantly amazed at the ability of the author to come up with some great little rhymes that permitted the children to remember exactly what the stories were. If my son now says, “Mom, I forgot what 8×8 is..” I’ll shout out, “STICKS are FOR the fire!”

The story for this particular math problem is that two snowman {shaped like 8’s} go walking on a cold winter night. They get really cold when they stumble upon a sign that tells them they can have the sticks for the fire. Super simple.

After my son learned all the fact families I discovered City Creek Press also sells a learning pack to compliment Times Alive! Included are flash cards with picture clues, posters to color in and a few other simple goodies. It was offered inexpensively as a download. We all worked together coloring in the posters for my son’s math notebook. I laminated all the flash cards and we go through them {little brother too} each morning before we get going with any of our other school stuff.

What I love:

My son asked to do this programme! If a day passed and he didn’t get a turn with it he’d complain! Yep, and if his little brother was set up with another task at the time and missed out on the video or song there were tears and I’d have to replay it!
The stories were, for the most part, catchy.
For my visual learner, the color programme and the add-ons {mentioned below} allowed him to add more color and hands on learning.
I could play it on my Mac!

There are posters and flashcards with the picture clues on them that can be downloaded from the website! This allows us to practice what we learned in an easy to remember way! Not only that, there were some heated discussions over who was going to color which posters. I’m only slightly ashamed to admit I was part of those chats with my boys.

What I don’t like:

I confess there were a couple of stories that left me scratching my head. My son disagrees with me on this and since the programme was for him that’s what matters most, right?

Bottom Line:

My kids love this programme and have learned their multiplication facts with ease. I feel eternally grateful to the people over at City Creek Press for that! I wish their addition programme was also in video/song format.

Extra:

You can check out more of the songs, picture to color in, and test over at City Creek Press if you’re interested in knowing/seeing a little more.

Save $24.48 off the regular price on Times Alive

You can use the coupon code SOTxhalf to take $24.48 off the regular price of $48.95. Just add Times Alive to your cart and enter the coupon code and press apply. Bingo-you save $24.48. Be sure to enter the code, it doesn’t happen automatically. Order your product today because this offer expires on January 31, 2012. You can order from 1-100 for half price! To order now: CLICK HERE

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Moody Science Classics

Bible, Science 2 Responses »

Nov 052009

One of the goals my husband and I set when we first had children was to surround them with learning opportunities. We want them to love learning. And we don’t want learning to be something that just happens during “school”. Several years ago we saw an incredible special on the entire collection of Moody Science DVDs, and we knew immediately that we’d found something that we would like to own. We have not been disappointed.

Moody Classics, 19 DVDs

Each DVD is 28 minutes long, and there are 19 videos in the set. (They are also available separately.) There are a wide variety of science topics covered including many animals, plants, human anatomy and physics. Several of the videos weave in history lessons as well. All the videos end with a discussion relating the topic to a Biblical theme.

Though these are science videos, they are very unlike their modern counter-parts. Notably absent is the cool, science-geek character found in most of today’s videos. The videos don’t jump between segments with wild graphics and pop music. Each episode contains a variety of information that may not seem related at first, but the relationship between the topics is made clear by the end. They always include interesting laboratory demonstrations. Though I wouldn’t describe the videos as “exciting”, they are all very interesting. Amazing things about each topic are demonstrated and explained. They are also not strictly for children and never talk down to the watcher. My husband and I enjoy watching them and have learned something from every episode. (We’ve both got science backgrounds and my husband teaches chemistry.)

For example, we most recently watched Signposts Aloft. It was about using instruments in airplane flight. It showed how pilots could fly without instruments in good weather, but in poor weather the sense of sight is useless, and they cannot rely on their sense of direction. They did a very interesting demonstration where a blindfolded man was spun around. He reported what direction he was spinning. At the beginning he felt he was spinning in the right direction, but then he felt he had stopped and was beginning to turn in the other direction. However, it was obviously false. This false sensation was explained using a model of the inner ear. (We duplicated this experiment at home. You can watch it at A Day in the Life – Fooling the Senses.) They also visited the site of an airplane crash in World War II. The pilot had flown past his base and crashed in the Libyan dessert all because he didn’t trust his instruments. The importance of having “faith” in the instruments was stressed and reinforced in a short interview with a very young John Glenn. Finally, the point was made that faith and science are not mutually exclusive pursuits. Further, we need to have faith in the Bible, because sometimes life is like flying without visibility, and the Bible provides us with the right direction.

Over the years I have used these videos in several ways. Occasionally I have pulled one out that relates to our current science study. Sometimes I have had the children watch one for a science lesson when I was sick, or had something I needed to do. Mostly though, they’ve served as family entertainment. They really are that good.

Written by Kristen – Relaxed Classical Mom of 4. She blogs at A Day in the Life.