Mathletics and 3P Learning {Review}

There are times in our day {especially when trying to balance teaching four kids} that there are some lapses between subjects. We have different activities we use to fill the gaps, and lately Mathletics has been the girl’s activity of choice.

About Mathletics

3P Learning has developed an online curriculum~based math program called Mathletics that has over 750 learning games for children grades Kindergarten to 8th grade. The site offers 24 hour support and access to everyone. Essentially ~ it’s pretty amazing.

Before starting the program, children create an avatar to represent themselves ~ hair color, face shape, eyes, nose, etc… Once the avatar is created, the fun begins!

The instructional part of Mathletics has children work through age-appropriate math concepts in different areas {workbooks are also available as a pdf download for additional practice}. Children choose an area to focus on and are offered ten questions/problems to solve in each section. As they answer the question, they are given immediate feedback {correct/incorrect} and finish the remaining problems.

Based on how many questions they answer correctly, they are rewarded with points which they can later use to ‘purchase’ features to personalize their avatar. While working through the problems, children are able to get step-by-step directions if needed. Once a section is completed, children can move on to another section.

To give you an idea of what Mathletics covers, here are the main areas in the third grade course:

Features I Liked

• Parents have the ability to track their child’s progress ~ can see what topics have been covered and how they are doing
• Questions in topic areas get harder as a child answers them correctly
• INSTANT feedback on answers ~ children know right away if they answered a problem correctly
• Rewards and certificates when children make progress
• Parents can set areas for their children to focus on {in the parent resource center}
• Student workbooks and answer keys to download for additional practice {not all grade levels are currently provided}

I am thrilled because Mathletics clued me into something about Laurianna’s learning style and needs. While I know that she is competitive, it can take forever for her to finish a math worksheet….sometimes pushing an hour to answer seemingly simple questions. When playing Mathletics, she was flying through similar questions. The reason? Instant feedback on her answers helped her move along quickly and gave her confidence in herself!

Our Learning Time

Laurianna was the first one to try out Mathletics. To say that she liked it would be an understatement. One game quickly turned into two, and kept going and going. Especially when she realized that she was able to compete against other kids in the US and in the world ~ then it became sheer competition to get the most points. At one point she did make it to 3rd in the world…after a total of almost 6 hours playing the math games.

After playing a few games she was able to check out the main screen and see her overall ranking. The instant gratification for her was amazing.Laurianna’s excitement was contagious and soon McKenna was asking to have a turn playing along. Between the both of them, they logged in more computer time that week than I think they have in FOREVER. They enjoyed it that much. Especially changing their little avatars and buying new accessories to ‘pretty’ themselves up.

Knowing that our trial period is almost up has been a little saddening for the girls ~ and they’ve enjoyed it so much we are seriously considering a year-long subscription to Mathletics. Our only hesitation is that we have have to buy one for each of the girls ~ there aren’t any family subscriptions, so it would be $49.95 per child.

For some reason I had difficulty opening pdf files from Mathletics in my Firefox browser. Customer service was more than willing to help out, but I was able to use Internet Explorer to open the files without problems. Apparently it was only my computer giving me issues though since others haven’t had the same problem and the software is actually tested using Firefox.

Find Out More

If you are interested in a subscription to Mathletics, you might want to know the answer to a key question ~ it’ll save you $10! The human calculator’s favorite number? 9.