This post was sponsored, but all opinions are my own.
If by "homeschool", you meant that I could make them do assignments on the interwebs all day. And I had enough laptops to make that an option. But seriously, PowerMyLearning , which was created by the educational tech non-profit CFY, is my new favorite kids' site.
First of all, it's free. Not very many free learning web sites are actually good, but PowerMyLearning is. They have compiled the best learning games and activities available online and organized them by subject, grade level (K - 12) and common core standards. There are foreign languages. There's geography. There are virtual piano lessons. And typing. To me, typing is right up there with swimming, driving and cooking as a major life skill. Plus, there are typical subjects like multiplication and reading comprehension and whatnot. I'm telling you, the only things the kids would miss out on are sports. And only Lovebug's really into sports.
I like that parents can sign up, then have different logins for their kids. Educators can sign up as well, and have different logins for each of their students. Then you can create "playlists" of games the kids should play, which would make differentiating instruction much easier. I haven't gotten into the ways to keep track of what the kids do yet, but I know you can get detailed reports tracking what your kids have played and stuff. There's a support center covering how to make playlists and get reports, I've just been too busy to do it yet. Which is probably why it's a good idea that I don't homeschool.
PowerMyLearning is being overhauled this week, to make it bug-free, so only Ironflower and Lovebug got to play on it - and not as much as they would have liked. They LOVED it.
It's very easy for kids (and adults) to see the game options. It was a lot harder for Lovebug, especially, to decide on which games to play; "Mommy, but they all look fun!" He would really like to replace his summer learning notebook with PowerMyLearning, that's how enthusiastic he was about it.
We'll definitely be using it as way to earn extra video game time, that's for sure. I'm just not sure how much I'm going to want to share my computer.
2 comments:
You are so right that most free learning sights suck. This one actually looks really great!
I am going to set up some accounts there today. Katarina will be excited to have more games during her computer time. And I will be excited to have them be focused on learning.
@Tracie - There's such a nice wide range of activities. I hope Katarina enjoys it!
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