Jacob, who is in high school now, has been using an 8-week online writing program for the past four weeks from Time4Writing.com, so he is halfway through it. This is a class entirely online which allows the student to work one-on-one with a teacher. After reading the lesson for the day, the student submits an assignment and waits for the teacher to grade it and provide feedback. Jacob is able to, then, fix his assignment based on the teacher's recommendations or move onto the next assignment if he scored well. If an assignment needs corrected, the teacher doesn't score him until he resubmits it. It seems like he's done more resubmitting than moving on, but he is halfway through the program, which is where he should be.
Time4Writing.com has courses for grades 2 through 12. Jacob is taking the high school essay writing course. It is divided into 8 units including pre-writing; writing the thesis; the introductory paragraph; the body; the concluding paragraph; revising, editing, and proofreading; writing the persuasive essay; and publishing your writing.
Jacob says, "It is a good program. It has good ideas to help kids learn how to write essays, gives good tips, and helps you to learn better writing techniques." I asked him if he feels it has helped him become a better writer, and he said it has. He gets frustrated when he has to redo assignments, but that has helped him think through things a bit better before writing.
Each eight-week course is only $99. If you aren't sure which course your child should be taking, the teachers will help you to figure that out. There is also a 14-day money back guarantee in case you aren't satisfied with the program. I find that I appreciate this program and the feedback from the teacher who is working with Jacob because that is one subject I do not have to teach. While I feel qualified to teach Jacob how to be a better writer, he takes constructive criticism better when it is coming from someone else.
Time4Writing is flexible with our schedule. I knew the kids were going to be away at camp for a week, so I just emailed the teacher to let her know. This gave us an extra week to complete the program. He has also been able to get on at all different times of the day. There was one day he didn't get around to doing an assignment until after dinner. The assignments haven't taken very long for him to do either, probably 15 minutes at the most so far. There will be longer assignments as the course progresses, but he is not bored or frustrated with this program.
Since Jacob has made it halfway through the course, his teacher sent me an email about his progress. This was a personalized email about how she felt he was doing in the course and a reminder of how I could go into his profile and read all of the comments she has written about each assignment and the grade he received.
I was curious about the origin of Time4Writing and found this on their website:
"Time4Writing is a product offered by Time4Learning. Time4Learning.com, was founded in 2003 to improve education among today’s computer-loving students. Time4Learning provides online preschool lessons, online elementary curriculum, and online middle school curriculum for reading, writing and arithmetic as well as social studies and sciences. In 2008, Time4Learning created Time4Writing.com, a series of eight-week online writing classes taught and facilitated by experienced writing teachers."
Individual teachers can be reached by email, but Time4Writing.com can be contacted at
6300 NE 1st Avenue, Suite 203
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33334
954-771-0914
or
1-888-771-0914
info@time4writing.com
If you are interested in reading other reviews by the Homeschool Crew, visit http://schoolhousereviewcrew.com/786192/
DISCLAIMER: I received this product free of charge so that I would provide an honest review.
