My Full Heart: Homeschooling with CTCMath

Math is the subject that I worry about the most in regard to homeschooling. I worry that they’re going to fall behind, struggle with concepts, or miss out on learning something they’re going to need later on. Math is a subject that builds on itself year after year, and mastery of math concepts is critical to moving on to more difficult topics.

Silas and Titus have been using CTCMath over the summer to work on their math skills. We were given a 12-month family membership to this online math curriculum. CTCMath offers prerecorded video tutorials and interactive math questions, games, and tests for kindergarten through 12th grade. I selected the 5th grade level for Titus who will be going into 5th grade this year and the Basic Math and Pre-Algebra for Silas who will be entering 7th grade this year.

CTCMath is very easy to use! Silas and Titus log-in around three times a week to complete a lesson. There is a video tutorial for every single lesson, and they would watch these videos first. Each video is 4-9 minutes long and explain the math concepts really well. The narrator’s voice is very calming and easy to listen to. He has a gift for teaching math! He provides plenty of example problems that increase in difficulty for each concept so your child can really see how to work a variety of the problems. 

After watching the video tutorial, there are interactive practice questions your child can work. There are around ten questions for each concept, and your child receives immediate feedback on their answer. They receive a percentage grade for each set of questions, and this grade is averaged with all of the other percentages in the category for a cumulative percentage. They also have a level that shows how well they are doing – platinum for 100%, gold, silver, and bronze levels for less than that.  Each time your child gets a question right, they get a star on the “mastery” bar – when they answer a certain number of questions correctly, they have mastered the topic with a blue star. Sometimes the boys had to repeat the questions (with different problems) to attain mastery, even with they got a 100%. Titus wasn’t as worried about having all blue stars beside the topics he completed, but Silas wanted all of his to show mastery.

There is also an option to print a worksheet with the questions. This is great if your child doesn’t like working on the computer, if the concepts require space to work out, or if you want a paper record of what your child is doing.

There are weekly reports for the parents that show your child’s progress. These reports have everything from the dates and times your child was logged in, the tutorials they watched and questions they answered, their percentage grade, and how many lessons they completed for the week. These are great for at-a-glance summaries. They are emailed to the parent email each week and are available to view from your online account.

Titus has also really enjoyed playing one of the extra games, Times Tables Shoot ‘Em Up. It’s a space-themed game focusing on multiplication facts. This is one area that I’ve really wanted him to practice this summer, so he’s gotten a good bit of practice playing this game. You can choose which times table to work on, and although he usually chooses an easier one so he’ll win the game, I do ask him to try the harder ones sometimes.

We have been very pleased with CTCMath! Silas and Titus both don’t mind logging in to do a math lesson a few times a week, even though it is summer! They have both learned quite a bit from the video tutorials. There was only one lesson that Silas did where the interactive questions were a bit difficult to complete for him – the long multiplication lesson. He would have been better off to work them on paper, but he wanted to do it online. Every other lesson has been really easy to navigate and complete. The entire lesson, video and questions, takes them each less than 15 minutes a day to complete. I really think it’s been great for them and helped to prevent the “summer slide” of math concepts.

CTCMath is a full online math curriculum but can also be used as a supplement. I believe I’ll have Titus keep using this as a supplement to his regular math program this school year. It doesn’t take long each day and you can choose which topics to work on each day. I fully believe that you can use this as a full curriculum.  The best part is – homeschoolers get 50% off the cost of the membership! If you’d like to see what other Crew members thought of CTCMath, click the banner below!