Dr. Aardsma's Math Drill - Reviews anyone?

[stacim]

I am still trying to work out my schedule with my 3 school-age children, and still need to do some drill work with at least 2 of the 3. I know I could use good old- fashioned flash cards, but even the thought of adding that in right now seems overwhelming when I don't have everything else working smoothly yet.

I was thinking about giving Dr. Aardsma's Math Drill (http://www.atseducation.com/store/mathdrill.php) a try, but thought I'd ask for opinions here first.

TIA!
Staci

[jannylynn]

I like http://www.iknowthat.com for online math games/drills. It's free too! (which I prefer!)

We also enjoy these free and simple math drills:

http://www.aea267.k12.ia.us/cia/math/Routines.html

[plain jane]

I used it this year with one in grade 3.

I like that it's incremental, starts very basic and gets harder as the student progresses. It repeatedly brings up questions that they get wrong and you have the option at the end of each drill to print out the results and see which facts your dc are getting correct and which were wrong. I like that you can see where their weaknesses are.

At first, it gives the student a lot of time to complete but as they work through the lessons and get better, the program does prompt them to move faster if they are pausing too long on a question. I find the program quick, easy, and efficient. It does what it sets out to do and does it well. I noticed great improvement in the 3 months we used it.

The downside is once they are past a certain level in their addition and multiplication, the program starts testing them on units of measure. How many inches in a foot, feet in a yard, quarts in a gallon, etc. While my dc do know all of this, it really slowed them down in the drills and it's not what I wanted my math drills to focus on. It also gets into asking them math terms- addend, sum, subtrahend, etc. Again, good things to know but it would throw dc for a loop and again slow down their overall time. Because the program is intuitive and these questions took longer, the program would bring up these kinds of questions more often. By the time I dropped the program, I was a the point where 1/3 of the questions were of the sorts described above and not math facts. This annoyed me enough to stop using it.

YMMV, of course, but I was a bit disappointed because I wanted a no-frills math drill and this one was wonderful up until a certain point.