We have done very little school for 2 weeks now. My husband had surgery Thursday. It has been a LONG journey and it has been a very painful recovery time for him. My kids have spent alot of time at my mother’s house while I tend to my husband.

Now that he has finally had the surgery, I feel like I can start scheduling more of our days.

I decided today that we must do something over the weekend. I do not have the energy to oversee each one do his/her time4learning on the computer, so I printed up worksheets (from t4l)for each child to work on as a review.

I have to admit that I struggled a bit with T4L at first.  Getting started was very easy.  Signing up….a breeze.  Teaching each child to log-on gave them a true feeling of independence.

Choosing the levels for each child was easy, yet a tad weird since I have a child in need of access to both the lower and upper levels.

My boys automatically wanted to follow the guiding arrow.  Such a great idea!  I was disappointed that I could not move the arrow when skipping or rearranging the activities to fit our other studies.  It would be great to have more control of this handy tool.  The boys could be truly self-starting if they could just follow that arrow.

Setting up a schedule was a struggle.  I really needed more guidance with the lesson plans.  Wondering if my daily plan was lacking or too much, I searched the parent forum for advice.  That left me just as confused.  No one seemed to know what equaled one lesson: a bubble, an icon,  __ number of activities??  

The new, improved lesson plans are very nice!  However, I still believe a sample lesson plan each for full homeschooling, supplementing, and after-schooling would be really helpful for the beginning user.

After a very short time with the program, we have totally embraced T4L, making all of these issues seem pretty trivial in light of what we’ve gained.

I was very frustrated when I first started t4l. As you may recall, my plan to do Sonlight for all of my children, plus the neighbor quickly soured.

So I was really seeking (immediate!)support and relief when I signed up for t4l. Thank GOODNESS someone on the forums mentioned that it takes about 2 weeks to feel comfortable.

I wanted to just give up and quit so many times while I was adjusting educational levels, figuring out how to exit the lesson correctly so that the lesson gets marked completed,etc.

I am so glad I stayed. Even though, I am still pretty far from “stress free”, using t4l is a huge improvement. Even if a lesson is hard one day, it does get easier.And because of the excellent explanations, I have learned to be a better teacher when I supplement t4l w/ something else.

As I go along, I realize that every lesson doesn’t have to be completed, that every question doesn’t have to have the “perfect” answer typed out.

We all have some sort of bump, don’t we?

We have to deal with a lot of medical-type interruptions in our house.

Our youngest is a CHD Warrior!  Eli was born with complex congenital heart disease.  He has a very rare defect, along with three very common heart defects.  We found out during the pregnancy and were encouraged to terminate the pregnancy-that week!    

We immediately chose life and had to re-plan our delivery hospital, OB, and even the pediatrician we planned to use.  We expected Eli to have surgery a couple of days after birth, then another at about 6 months, another possibly at a year or so.

Eli is 2 years, 4 months old and has not had any surgeries yet!   However, we are looking at a possible surgery later this spring/summer.  He is truly a miracle…..

He has many, many doctor appointments….in two other cities.  So, we attempt to work around them.  

I was sincerely concerned about my first grader’s schooling.  I felt he was getting lost in the shuffle.  Not anymore, thanks to T4L.

By the way, Eli is our second heart kid.  We lost our oldest son after heart surgery in 1993.  

I believe I first came across t4l a few years ago on the internet. At some point, we tried the demos, but my learning disabled(LD) son was so easily frustrated then, he didn’t like them.When I first saw it, I was deterred by the cost. T4l is reasonably priced, but it seemed like too much since I have 4 children.

As the kids get older(one is finishing 7th grade), and as we have discovered some special needs, we figured a raise in the school budget was warranted. It is worth it for our family( and everyone’s situation is different :) )to invest in whatever we need to school our children. At this point in my life, I do not have the time, energy and everything else that is necessary to seek out freebies on the internet, make frequent trips to the library,etc. And in the end, it is cheaper than private school.

It was very hard getting started w/ t4l. Thank goodness, I visited the forums frequently and already knew it would take about 2 weeks to feel comfortable. I would get discouraged and want to give up, but I kept going.

And now, I could do commercials for t4l!