Sometimes math can get monotonous and boring. Or you may find yourself getting close to finishing your regular curriculum and wonder what to do next. Well, that is the predicament I found ourselves in this year. I knew our regular math curriculum would be finished before the end of the year and we weren't really prepared to move onto the next grade level. Luckily for us the opportunity arose to review GPALOVEMATH from GPA LEARN. This company graciously gave us the chance to use and review this product with access to all five levels.
Current support platforms for the product include: Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac computers, Apple iPad, and Samsung Galaxy Tab 4. GPALOVEMATH is a streaming online product that can be used on the following browsers: Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 11, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple Safari 6 and 7. In our household we mostly used the program on Google Chrome with no problems. GPALOVEMATH is recommended for students in grades K-5. Each grade level has a different learning coach that teaches the material to the student and guides them along the way. We concentrated on the 5th grade level and our coaches were Dino and Nina. Two of my three tutoring students worked with me on this review. We decided to do it all together as review. This meant we listened to the lesson together, then did the practice problems and quiz problems together taking turns coming up with the answers. Typically we worked on this product three days a week Monday - Wednesday.
With this online math program the parent will find four main areas to investigate, explore, and use. The first is the Dashboard which is a centralized location to see what lessons your child has accomplished, what problems they may have had, rewards handed out, and any messages, etc. from the engage area of the program. The Learn section is where we spent 90 percent of our time. Here you can navigate around to the different lessons and topics available. There are drop down menus to choose the grade level and the topic order for each. Next is the Engage section which unfortunately I didn't need to use as of yet. In this area you can post questions and engage with other users of the program. The fourth section is Motivate which utilizes a way for parents to reward and motivate their students for hard work and accomplishments. The girls were pretty happy near the end of the review period to win a reward that let them get out of a chore and make their parent do that chore. For my two students that consisted of vacuuming and cleaning a hamster cage. The parent can use what the program offers as recommended rewards or curtail the rewards to what your family most identifies.
The topics we chose to cover were decimals and geometry. I found out real quick the girls enjoyed the geometry lessons much more than the decimal lessons. I think this mostly revolved around just preference more than anything related to the actual product. Something the girls were not very fond of was the robotic voice of the coaches. They repeatedly asked me to turn down the volume and sometimes even read the lesson themselves instead of listening to Dino and Nina. We also grew a little tired of the BOLT acronym (used to teach the method to solve problems) which was reviewed in every single lesson multiple times. BOLT stands for B - Break it Down, O - Organize a Plan, L - Let's Solve, T - Test Your Answer. Saying all this I do think it is a good product and as we neared the end of the review period both girls wanted to continue on with the program. I believe our next step with this product will look like this - finishing up our current math curriculum (only 14 lessons left) and start reviewing more math concepts from GPALOVEMATH until the end of the year.
If you are looking for something different to do for math you may want to take a look at GPALOVEMATH and see if it might be a good fit for you and your family. Also talk a look at what other Crew Members had to say as well about this product.
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