Wednesday, April 15, 2009

ALEKS Math

In my last post (from long, long ago) I wrote about Teaching Textbooks. I mentioned that my daughter really liked it but I wasn't all that sure of it. In the comments concernedCTparent pointed me in the direction of ALEKS Math. She mentioned a one month free trial but on the site I could only find a 48 hour trial. Bummer. Ah well, I signed us up, Catherine tried it and loved it. I discussed a subscription with my husband but we worried about committing to something that might just be appealing at first glance and decided to hold out for a bit.

Catherine didn't much like our decision and has been asking us to reconsider every day for the past week. I finally said today that if she really wanted to try it a bit more then she could pay for a month with her own money. Guess what? She thought that was a great solution.

I found a better solution though. I googled "ALEKS one month free trial" and came up with this link. There, I signed up for one month free and could qualify for two free months just by selling out and offering up the emails of two homeschooling friends. Whoo hoo!

One month is much better then two days. It's all too common to try some curriculum or program and get caught up in the newness of it only to realize a few weeks or a month later that it's been abandoned to the dusty pile of unused material that holds 85% of your homeschool related purchases. One month, hopefully two, will give Catherine and I a much better idea of whether ALEKS will be a useful tool. Because goodness knows, with Teaching Textbook, Singapore, Math Mammoth, the Key to Series and the several dozen odd texts and workbooks I've got sitting around we just don't have enough math resources.

Anyway, I thought I'd post the one month free trial link because I simply couldn't find it by wandering around the ALEKS site and thought there might be some others out there in the same boat. Enjoy.

4 comments:

concernedCTparent said...

Oh no. I was hoping you'd read my follow up comment to your last post. I realized that the link had been changed so I provided you with a one-month link (w/opportunity to upgrade to 2 months as we did) in the comments of your Teaching Textbooks post.

Ah well. You've got it all straightened out.

You're absolutely right. Forty eight hours is not enough time to realize if it's a good fit. Two months turned out to be perfect.

We ended up subscribing because it will work well over the summer months when we spend time away from home and with family for extended periods-- no math books to carry around in our luggage! We can log in from anywhere.

Wendi Brant said...

Thank you so much for this post and linky love! I am just getting ready to HS my 11 year old and 10 year old and math is the one area that is my weakest and I HATE it. This program looks perfect on the outside. We will sign up for a free trial period during the summer. Thanks again!
Wendi
Too Cool For School website underconstruction: www.wearetoocoolforschool.blogspot.com

Anonymous said...

I will be checking this out too I think. H needs some math practice and M is finally getting math brained. It looks good.

So where are our new house pics? Hmmm?

Anonymous said...

I like the point you're making about school material. I realized also that everything knew seems great but then, after a while, you realize that it doesn't always make your learning experience such a great fun time and it's easy to quit using it to find another one that seems fun and so on...

I've tried learning Spanish on my own and I realized it's more difficult than I thought. French is my mother tongue and I learnt English in the US. That was a fun delightful experience. But learning a foreign language in a book is just boring... I haven't found the great one yet!