An Honest Times Alive Review
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A few weeks ago I received a membership to Times Alive from Times Tables the Fun Way in exchange for an honest Times Alive review. I was excited about this opportunity because multiplication is one of those math topics that needs to be really mastered before moving on to new material. It can be tricky to teach multiplication. Times Alive can help.
Overview of the Times Alive program:
Times Alive features online lessons with animated songs and stories to learn times tables the fun way.
The program combines tests, movies, songs, online painting, and quizzes to help your children master the multiplication table. A pre-test is given before any lessons are taught so you can measure your child’s progress.
The Times Alive tests act as progress checks.
As soon as the student completes the test, their score and time are recorded. You can see the score and time by viewing the student progress report.
The mistakes are not shown, and the program does not rework those problems into future lessons. This is easy to get around, though. You can either ask your child not to press the ‘next’ button until you see the screen, or you have the option to print out the tests and have your student complete them on paper.
The movies and songs are what make the Times Alive program so effective. They are perfect for kids who learn through either visual or mnemonic cues.
At the beginning of each lesson, a short movie plays that introduces the characters (the numbers) and tells the story. Next, a song that is based on the movie is sung. The illustrations appear on the screen to help the math fact memorization process.
After the movie and songs, there is a short review period called the Guessing Game where the students need to correctly answer math facts. This should be easy as both the movie and song just taught the math fact. The act of filling in the math fact blanks helps the student process what they just learned. The Guessing Game acts as a short quiz between lessons.
After a few multiplication facts, there is a small art lesson with online painting. The child uses the mouse to choose paint colors and fill in images from the stories. Honestly, my children were not huge fans of this part of the program because there wasn’t much control over details of the painting. It is a nice little brain break though.
How We Used Times Alive:
Multiplication is one of those skills that you have to really master before you can move on because it invades all other areas of math – geometry, fractions, order of operations, etc. That is why it is important to me that my kids have a strong multiplication foundation. This comes pretty easily for one of my kids, but another has worked very hard to memorize every fact.
Times Alive is not a stand-alone math curriculum. It is a math supplement to be used until the times table is memorized. We spent 15-20 minutes logged in to the Times Alive website 4x a week.
One of the great things about this program is that it does not require interaction from the parent.
This allowed me to put one child on the Times Alive website with a pair of headphones while I taught my other child one-on-one. You can use this program from your computer anywhere you have WIFI, so we frequently used time spent waiting for one child to finish a co-op class to work through Times Alive.
One membership is good for your entire family so all of your children can use it. Each child will have a different login name of your choosing. This is helpful because it keeps each child’s progress separate.
I logged into each child’s progress report every few days to see how they were doing.
Our Times Alive results:
We are still working our way through the Times Alive program. I can see improvement already, though.
Hannah has tried so hard for years to memorize all of the multiplication facts. She began the program with 70% proficiency. In just a few weeks, she has jumped to 90%! She has a few more lessons to go until she takes the post-test, but I expect her to pass with flying colors.
She is a visual learner, and this format has helped her tremendously.
Ben is just now encountering multiplication in his math work. He completed the program very quickly. Too quickly, it seems. He did show improvement, but not as much as if he had slowed down and taken his time, not moving on until he had memorized the previous multiplication fact.
So, now he is working his way through the Times Alive program again. That’s okay, though. A student can take their time and progress through the program as they master each fact, or they can go through the program multiple times.
Every child is different, so there is no right way to master the program.
The ideal student for Times Alive:
- Understands the concept of multiplication – Times Alive is great for memorization, but does not teach why we multiply.
- Is a visual learner. Times Alive is a fantastic way to teach multiplication facts to visual learners.
- Has access to internet access. The program is available online, so good internet access is a must.
Tips:
- Hit the ‘Quit’ button before leaving the site in order to save your progress.
- Use the same computer and exact same user name every time in order to see your saved progress.
- Plan to go through the program slowly or a few times to get the biggest benefit.
Cost:
Currently, a Time’s Alive monthly subscription is $11.95/month with a $6.95 setup fee.
Keep reading . . .
- Best Homeschool Curriculum Reviews
- All About Math Review
- Math Mammoth Review
- How to Use Khan Academy for Math
- How to Teach Multiplication
