I'm immediately skeptical of the advertising claims but that's just me. I'd be more interested in looking into it if someone I'd known in real life had actually used the program and felt it was beneficial.
The cost is totally inexpensive in my mind for the times tables thing and that is something that both my mathy kids need right now - they are floating along learning them slowly but it's causing frustration for Aiden (7) in his Soroban abacus program currently as well as for his other stuff he keeps wanting to do.
How is Aiden's math facts knowledge frustrating him? Is it holding him back from doing work he wants to in his abacus program, or does he feel the work he's doing is slowed down by not knowing math facts? From everything I've been told (and experienced with my own kids), learning math facts has a huge "developmentally ready" component to it, same as reading does to a certain extent, maybe more so. Most children at 7 (even in some cases PG kiddos) aren't necessarily ready yet to be able to memorize and regurgitate math facts quickly. I would be concerned about investing $ in a program specifically for math fact mastery that might work *for now* and then find out that after a few months away from the program "poof" all math facts have been forgotten. I've seen that happen with my now-9 year old in school - she went to a traditional school in 2nd grade (at 7) that really pushed the math facts, and she was quite good at them - top of the class, a real speed demon, had all of her multiplication facts down cold at the end of the school year. Then summer happened, and at the start of third grade she'd forgotten every single danged fact. And oddly enough, drill-and-kill facts was once again a big piece of her 3rd grade math curriculum.. indicating to me that perhaps my dd wasn' the *only* child who'd forgotten those danged facts over the summer. So she learned them all again and... you guessed it... lost a ton of them over the summer before 4th grade
She's most of the way through 4th grade now, it's taken less practice to relearn them and I suspect they'll stick much better this time around... but that's just my take on it - if she'd never seen a math fact until 4th grade, and just focused on math concepts before 4th, I think she would have been at the same place she is now anyway. Same would have happened with my other kids - which is why I wouldn't invest in a program purely for learning math facts if my kids were in early elementary school.
polarbear
