Improved Online Math Curriculum

Homeschool Review Crew

CTCMath

 

We love doing math with CTCMath!  It’s so fun and easy.  It’s an online math curriculum.  Now with the Homeschool Review Crew, our subscription has been extended so we can bring you a review on their improved online math curriculum.  They’ve changed some things for the better since our last review.  We have the 12-month family membership.  This was extended for us for five children.  I actually do buy this improved online math curriculum and we do use this as our main math curriculum for our homeschool.   We currently have nine children using the program for this school year. 

About the Program

CTCMath covers your needed math curriculum for grades K-12.  That means from learning the numbers all the way up to algebra and calculus.  This program is Australian based but does have a US program.  

Each child has their own login and password. When they log in they can access all of their years and courses or click to access tasks assigned to them.  So far I have not assigned tasks as we have not started our next official year yet.  However, my kids do at least three lessons of math a week, normally more than that.  They get to work through a grade level and can pick and choose what they do as long as they complete that grade level before moving on to the next one.

As well as having their own login and password, the student also can customize what color their main page is as well as a few other things.  My kids love having that ability. 

 

 

How it works is your child will watch a video for a lesson.  The videos are super short ranging from around four minutes to nine or ten minutes in length.  Perfect for short attention spans.  After completing the lesson they answer questions to show how they understand the lesson.  You as the parent can set the bar for what constitutes a pass or fail and how many times they can or need to retake the questions.  

The creator of CTCMath is a homeschool dad of 10.  He wanted math to be fun and engaging and saw this wide-open market that he could create a program for.  From there he created CTCMath.  Now though CTCMath is evolving into a new and improved online math curriculum with some helpful tweaks.  

There are not just boring math worksheets on this website.  Rather there are fun short videos and also fun games.  My kids love doing the times tables and speed skills.  There is also a swap pieces game but I don’t think my kids have really done that one. 

Improvements

Since we started using CTCMath years ago they have changed several things.  Some of those are adding more lessons to areas where they were sparse and doing diagnostic testing after sections of the math curriculum.

The newest improvements have just rolled out!  These include question banks where you can create customizable worksheets for your child to do.  New to the program also are the printable worksheets that your child can do to correspond with lessons.  

A lot of the improvements involve things that you can do from your parent dashboard.  These include making the customizable worksheets from the question bank and also assigning lessons and activities for your child. I’ll address making the question bank worksheets later on in more detail. 

 

 

Parent Dashboard

The parent dashboard is simple and easy to navigate.  I love having this access at my fingertips.  It is simple to get into.  You go to the main CTCMath website.  From there click log in and then the parent login.  Students have their own login and there is also an option for teacher login if this is being used by a school.  As a homeschool parent though you want the parent login.

From your main dashboard, you can see all your children enrolled in the program.  You can see when they were last on and what they were doing while on.  This could be what videos they watched and what questions they answered.  Plus it tells you how long that took them, which can be helpful to know if they’re struggling with an area or not. 

 

 

You can also assign lessons to your child’s accounts from here.  This will allow you to check whether you want weekly progress reports emailed to you or awards and certificates.  I personally do not have the weekly reports sent to me as I get on at least once a week to check up on what they’ve been doing and see that they’ve completed what they need to. 

There is a section that lists out all the students.  Underneath each student, you can log in as them.  But what I like to see is their grade average for all the lessons they’ve done.  It also tells me how many lessons they’ve done on the program over their subscription.  So, some of my kids have done almost 500 lessons while others are closer to 50.

Within the dashboard is a section where you can see and download checklists for each grade so you can make sure of what skills your child has mastered versus what they have left to master.

 

 

Our Thoughts

We love CTCMath!  My kids beg to do their math.  They even want to do the math on Saturday and Sunday and I have to make them stop doing math sometimes.  That’s how much we love this program! They each love making their account their own. 

 

 

I love that CTCMath takes the teaching out of my hands.  Math was always a subject that I did well in.  There are state math competitions in my elementary years that I actually placed at and got awards.  But for some reason teaching math was not that easy to me.  It was hard actually.  Watching my kids struggle to get concepts and hate their math time was really hard for me. Why couldn’t they love math as I did?

Enter CTCMath.  We actually were introduced to CTCMath through the Homeschool Review Crew and a review years ago.  And we’ve never stopped using it!  I in fact have added all my kids on there who do school.  Currently, have nine students working on the math curriculum with the newest being added just this year as she starts kindergarten.  Two more waiting to be added as they get going onto school but that won’t be for a few more years.  

I love how easy CTCMath is for me to use.  It’s as simple as logging on and getting started.  Really it’s that simple for my kids to.  They get to log in and either click to see what I’ve assigned them(only used during the actual school year) or just work through years worth on their own.  

We are embarking on new courses this year with my two oldest starting high school.  They’re doing algebra I this year.  I thought I’d share what CTCMath offers for the middle school and high school years.

 

 

I know that one of my older two is going to be going through all of those lovely high school maths as she wants to become a vet so she will need them for college.  My other going into high school this year wants to be a carpenter and so he probably won’t do all of them.  What I might do though is make worksheets for him that include more of what he will need for preparing himself for his career.  

New Things

I love that CTCMath is always rolling out new and better things to their program.  First, it was the new lessons. My kids weren’t exactly happy about that.  They loved having all the lessons done in sections.  Then they got on the next day and boom there were undone lessons!  It didn’t take them long to go back and do them all though.  

Next came the weekly revisions.  These were to be done at the end of each week to help them remember and redo all the lessons they had done.  This was met with a small bit more resistance from my kids.  They didn’t want to take the time to go back over stuff when they could be trucking on along ahead.  Now we’ve come to terms with weekly and semester revisions and they’re just part of the normal routine.

The newest improvements are the assigning of tasks which I plan to use this year as well as the question bank.  I love how easy it is to find what you want to include on your question worksheet.  It’s as simple as picking a grade and then a concept.  This works well for me.  

My daughter who is 8 and doing 4-5th-grade math really likes being able to print off worksheets and work on them when she can’t be on the computer.  She loves math and likes to do this in her spare time.  I’m okay with that!  The new and improved online math curriculum from CTCMath definitely gets our stamp of approval. 

Another new thing is the user guide.  This has lots of videos helping you learn how to use the program.  I’m pretty familiar with the program but do go over there when they add a new feature because it’s best to see how it’s supposed to work before I go trying to make it work. 

 

 

If you can’t tell from reading this review, we love this program.  It gets our five thumbs up or ten thumbs up or however many thumbs they allow us.  I can definitely see us continuing to use this program all the way through high school with all of our kids.  That being said my two doing high school this year are using this as a supplement in addition to the algebra I that came with the school they are using this year.  We decided my college-bound daughter should start off her freshman year with a more “boxed” approach and I’m not so sure I like it!  But I love having this improved online math curriculum to fall back onto year after year, kid after kid. 

Learn More

You can learn more about CTCMath and what the program is like by reading all of the reviews linked up on the Main Blog Post over on the Homeschool Review Crew blog.  They can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube.  Also, feel free to read our old review of this improved online math curriculum to see more of what has changed.  It is located HERE and HERE.