I can’t believe it’s been five years since my youngest daughter was born. Natalie, now five years old, started Kindergarten this week, but it was towards the end of this years school year that it hit me. She was moving from Pre-School 3 days a week, 3 hours per day to Kindergarten, 5 days a week, all day long. My first concern was making sure that Natalie was ready for school, no only socially and emotionally but also that she was ready intellectually. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t about to make my child spend the entire summer doing school work just so she could be “ready.” But I also did not want her to fall behind, so I did some research for books, online programs and other homeschooling programs.
I came across Time4learning in June and immediately enrolled her. I could not believe how much fun she was having learning. Throughout the summer we worked on several lessons per day, her choice not mine. We still went on vacations to visit family and Natalie generally asked to go on Time4learning as her down time, usually when everyone else was just sitting around chatting. It was so cool to be able to log on no matter where we were.
Since we started I have seen her improve in word recognition, rhyming and her biggest struggle, recognizing coins. I’m glad she had so much fun learning the fundamentals of Kindergarten over the summer. Now that she is in school we use the program as a great resource and support for what she learns in school, besides, she loves the fun activities used in each lesson as well as the playground activities, so as far as that goes, it’s a win-win situation.
I will continue to share her progress as we move through this school year.
Terie








Terie
September 14, 2007 | 11:11 am1
Hey John,
I’m excited to be sharing our activities as well. Natalie is still learning how to log in on her own. I have a shortcut to the classroom on the desktop and she logs in automatically now. Natalie is scheduled to log in to her classroom for 15 minutes and then she can visit the playground for about 15 more. She is in Kindergarten attending public school. She is making a real connection now and loves the fact that she knows a lot of what happens in class mainly because she’s been following the Kindergarten curriculum over the summer.
Yesterday she logged on to the extension for language arts and that was a lot of fun for her. The first lesson talks about pollution and it just so happens that we were discussing what we recycle and also what happens to the trash that people throw on the ground, etc. So once again she really connected with the first lesson. Her face lit up when she realized she understood the topic.
Terie
john
September 9, 2007 | 1:13 pm2
Terie - I’m so excited that this blog has started as I’m terribly curious about how we (Time4Learning) fits into people’s lives. Does your child login by herself or does she need your help? Does she use the playground or just the lessons? And what level of lessons was she doing, the Preschool Playbox or the kindergarten materials?