Times Alive (Product Review)

 

Although Lindsey is midway through her 6th grade year, she still struggles a bit with not having memorized all of the times tables.  Even though it's geared for younger kids who are just learning their math facts, I decided to give Times Alive by Times Tables the Fun Way a chance to bring her up to speed.   We were given a three month subscription for this review.   Some students can finish the program with success after only one month, so subscriptions are on a month to month basis.

Times Alive offers interactive, online lessons with animated songs and stories to learn times tables the fun way.   Multiplication facts 0-9 are covered in this online product.  The website is easy to use, and kid friendly with lots of brightly colored graphics, cartoon character voices and easy to remember stories and songs.    The site includes fun, quirky videos and songs to help students remember their math facts.   I will say the songs are slightly annoying, simply because they get stuck in your head, as well as the kids head, while your student is learning.  However, the fact that they get stuck in your head does prove the effectiveness of this learning method, grins.

Each lesson has some speed drills, with a page of multiplication problems and the program keeps track of how quickly they compete the drill.   The correct amount of drill problems is also recorded for you.  There is built in review with each lesson.  The photo below is part of the review process, asking students to remember the story that went with the 7x7 fact.   

There are only 18 short lessons, which your students can redo as many times as necessary.  Additionally, there is a student progress report (pictured below) that allows both the parent and student to see which lessons have been done.  This report also shows test grades, and gives a key of what type of activities are included in each lesson.

If students don't do well on the pretest or test, you can hit "Clear" and it will permanently erase the score, and the student can then redo the test.   Since you can print the progress report, I suggest you print it before making any changes/redoing the tests and then you'll have a comparison for when they redo the work.

Please note that the program remembers each child's records as long as they are logging in from the same electronic device.  If your student uses a laptop for part of the work, then logs on from another device it will not cross reference the work that has been done.

Like I said at the beginning of the review, Lindsey is 11.   She completed all the lessons in two days of working with the program.  The lessons are short, so she plowed through pretty rapidly.  She did pick up on the fact that the songs and graphics are geared more towards the younger crowd, however she still thought it was fun to use and she really did improve on her 7, 8 and 9 facts.

To read other reviews of this program, click here.