We’ve been asking our Thinkster members to give us feedback on the program.
This is the text of an email that one new Thinkster member sent us:
This is to anyone who has been doing Kumon® and they or their child are getting stressed:
My son has been doing Kumon for a year. He was progressing well and according to their statistics, he was well above national average in his math.
However, it came at a price, and I was really beginning to wonder whether it was worth it. Talking to other parents in the Kumon centre, I realized I was not alone in feeling totally stressed out with the Kumon program. My child was rarely happy to sit and do 5 to 10 pages of repeated sums, all of which to his mind, looked the same. What was supposed to take 10 minutes invariably took at least double that time, sometimes even 40 minutes. There was hardly any time left for anything else.
To my surprise, after all that time and effort, he didn’t shine in his math report at school. In fact, he might have been able to do complex subtraction in columns, but was struggling on some basic number line work.
After searching for alternatives, I found Thinkster Math. This is my experience so far:
- Boys love iPads and would sooner tap away on the screen any day, than be faced with paper and pen.
- Thinkster is so portable that he can easily finish off a sheet or two on the short journey to picking up his brother from nursery. I offer him the choice, “You can do your math in the car now, so you have more play time at home, but its your choice!”
- The worksheets are in the right bite-size chunks and he dips in and out of it, without me having to dedicate 40 minutes pinning him to the desk. I can reward him immediately with iPad time of his own choice (this works really well on car journeys).
- I am no longer looking over his shoulder as much as when he was doing Kumon, because he gets immediate feedback and knows when he has made a mistake. The Thinkster app can’t lie!
