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CTC Math UPDATE // INCREDIBLY helpful new feature + my personal tips
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Jun 19, 2024
We love using CTC Math in our homeschool! And they've rolled out a great new feature to make planning your homeschool math curriculum much simpler. I'm sharing the update in this video, showing you how to use it, and sharing my personal CTC Math tips. Have any questions? Leave a comment below! RESOURCES FROM THIS VIDEO ➕ CTCMath Half-Priced Discount for Homeschoolers – https://blessedhomeschool.com/CTCMath Read my full review on the blog: https://blessedhomeschool.com/ctcmath-online-math-curriculum-review/ ********************************************* Hey there! I’m Sara, and I’m a teacher-turned-homeschooling mom to 4 kiddos (including a set of twins!). I balance homeschooling while working full-time from home, and am so thankful you are here. I love sharing about homeschooling on my blog, Blessed Homeschool, where you’ll find tips, resources, and curriculum reviews. Whether you are a newbie or a veteran, I hope you will leave inspired and equipped with what you find. MORE VIDEOS YOU MIGHT LIKE What *IS* CTCMath? — https://youtu.be/opycTf5Y-LQ
View Video Transcript
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Hey guys, welcome back to my channel. Today I'm going to be talking to you about the math curriculum we use, which is CTC Math
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They've recently come up with some great updates that make it a lot easier for you to plan out your lessons
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So I want to share those with you along with how I implement CTC Math in our homeschool and some tools that I use that might help you too
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Okay, so first. of all, what is CTC math? If you haven't heard about it, I actually have another video
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that explains it in more depth that you might want to check out. But in a nutshell, CTC
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Math is an online math curriculum that offers lessons for kindergarten through the 12th grade
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They use short, concise lessons that students can work through their own pace and adaptive
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questions that help your kids work at a level that's right for them. There are many features
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that I love that I'm not going to touch on in this video. So feel free to leave any questions
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for me in the comments but a big benefit I found is my ability to really customize my kids math
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lessons to what they need to work on and the flexibility we have to move at whatever pace we need to
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because we have all grade levels included in our subscription. I'm going to share some really
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helpful tips in this video that you might want to know if you're using CTC math. But if after
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this video you're curious to learn more, go check out my other video or leave a comment for me below and I would
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love to help you out. So the big thing I want to share in this video is a new update that
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CTC Math rolled out that really simplifies how you plan and assign lessons to your kids
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Originally, you had really two options for assigning lessons to your kids that use CTC Math
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So number one, you could not assign them anything and simply have your kids log in and work on
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lessons in whatever order within whatever level they were at. You might have them work for a certain
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amount of time each day or tell them how many lessons or which lessons you wanted
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completed, but you wouldn't necessarily have to assign anything. The program keeps
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track of exactly what they have worked on and completed. The second option
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which I did, was to actually assign tasks to your kids. So each week I would
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review what they had done the week before, see if they needed more work on any
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particular concepts, and then I would assign tasks to them for that entire week
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reason I liked to do this was because it was easy for my kids to see exactly what I wanted
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them to do for the week. When they logged in, they would see those assignments there and the
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due date. For my kids anyway, if I just told them to do their math for the day, probably not
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much would get done or they would spend like 10 minutes on their work. So I wanted to make sure
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I had some goals set and that they were making solid progress throughout the year. When I first
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began using CTC math, this process was honestly kind of confusing. me, we were coming to the program in the middle of the year, which was one hurdle. But even if I was
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coming in at the start of the year, and let's say my son had just completed fourth grade math
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and I wanted him working at fifth grade level, there was no way I could simply go in and
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assign him the fifth grade curriculum as a whole. I would either need to go in daily or weekly
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or at whatever interval and assign tasks one at a time for my son. And there are a lot of tasks to assign
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because CTC Math breaks them down by course and then stream, which would be like your unit
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and then by topic, so like all the individual topics in a particular unit. Once I figured out the
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system, it was fine, but it's a lot to take in at once if you're not used to it. Well, CTC Math
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recently rolled out an update called the course planner where you can essentially assign an entire
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grade level of work to your student all at once. This is a super helpful feature if you know what
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grade level you want your child to be working at and there are a lot of ways that you can customize
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this new feature to fit your schedule exactly. So what I'm going to do is show you my computer
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screen and give you a peek at what this is and how easy and now can be to assign work to your kids
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using CTC math. Let's go. Okay, so right now I'm logged into CTC math and what I did
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I've got my kids over here as our students. I created myself as a student so that I can go in and
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show you guys how this works. So I'm going to show you the new course planner. So what we're
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going to do is we're going to go to tasks. Now originally how I used to assign tasks is I would
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add a task and I would go in and assign each lesson kind of one by one. But now they've added
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this here, the course planner. And this is really going to help people that want to use it and
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who want to assign grade levels to their kids and all the tasks within that grade quickly
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and easily. So if I hit the drop-down menu, I'm going to go to myself, click on my name
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and this is all new. This is their new feature. So I can see my name is selected, and right now
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I don't have a course plan or anything assigned for myself. So let's say here, I want to set up
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geometry. All right. So we're going to do geometry. Once I select that, this pulls up over on the
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side. So it tells me, for geometry, it tells me how many lessons there are, how many diagnostic
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tests there are in case I wanted to use them. And it gives me an overview of how many weeks the
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course is and how many activities then would be assigned per week. Okay? And then it has a weekly
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schedule along the side and let start customizing this and we see what happens over there But you can choose to include diagnostic tests or not
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And within the diagnostic test, they have short, standard, or comprehensive. That just is varying the number of questions that your kids are asked
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The more questions, the more comprehensive. It will give you an idea on if they understand the topic or not
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So for now, I will uncheck that. The diagnostic tests are really good if, especially like we did, if you switch to CTC math in the middle of a semester, and you aren't sure what level to place your kids at
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So I had my kids do diagnostic tests for a while. But then once they got to the point where they were just not passing any of them, they hadn't seen this stuff yet, that's kind of where I knew where to start them in that particular level or that grade
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Okay. So you do have the option to include those here. All right, if we go down to the date settings
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So when you select your dates, the activities are going to be evenly distributed between the dates that you select
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So we can either do the remaining school year. So today's 14th of September through the 31st of May
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Or if you wanted to change that, you could set your own custom date range
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So if I knew I wanted them to finish this course earlier, I could set my end date to be earlier
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and it would evenly distribute those courses. For right now, we'll just do the remaining school year
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All right, and then you can select when the students are going to receive new activities each week
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So this is going to be when your kids log in, they're going to see a little bubble in their task tab
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that will tell them that they have activities that are due. And I believe they will get all the activities assigned for that week
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So you can set it for any day of the week and whatever time you want them to get those assignments
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Okay. You also have the option here to schedule activities during school holidays
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By default, they will not be given activities during school holidays, but you can check or uncheck that box
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Okay. Then you also have activity settings. So this is typical when you go to assign a task
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It says for activities with both interactive questions and a worksheet, the students can choose to
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do either one or you can assign that they strictly do the interactive questions or strictly do the
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worksheet. Not all the activities have worksheets, but if they have both, you have this option. And this
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checkbox students must reach their past grade on each activity before progressing. And this is a
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grade that you set when you set up all of your settings for the course. So if you uncheck that
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it will allow them to just do the activities, and no matter what grade they get, they will move on and
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keep moving on to the next one. So I have a minimum grade set, and I will check that because I want to
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make sure they're hitting that minimum grade before they move on to anything else. And then for
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reporting, email a report each time the activities fall due. So you can either check that or unchecked that
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depending on if you want to have a report email to you. Okay, so then if we scroll up to the
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side over here once I selected that course and those dates you can see that the weekly schedule
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was kind of set so immediately start the week one activities those are going to be assigned
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and then the week two activities are going to be assigned this upcoming Monday okay so in five
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days from now so it'll give you the timeline when those are going to be assigned and I'm not sure
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what this is. Oh, so we could change what we want the name to show up as. Okay. So if I want my kids to
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see this, all right, week one, basic 2D shapes and the topic. So this just changes the name of the
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activities, okay? So once we have all of that set, I'm going to go to create course plan
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Okay. It's going to tell me that I'm about to create a course plan for Sarah Reginsky
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This is the class. Here are the lessons. And by clicking create a course plan, a series of tasks will be generated
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You can review, modify, and delete tasks at any time. So we'll go ahead and create that course plan
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And it was successfully generated. So it's redirecting me now to just the general task page. Okay
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So let's go ahead. I'm going to log in now as myself as a student and see what it looks like
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So I can show you it should hopefully have immediately assigned tasks, but let's go ahead and see what that looks like
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So to do that, I'll click on Home. Okay, and then once in here, I'm going to scroll down and I'm going to hit log in as Sarah
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Okay, so this will take me to my student page. And when I go in, this is old work that I had up from last time when I was logged in
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But if you go up to tasks, you see that there's this bubble up here. So it tells me that I have a task assigned to me
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So I'll click on this. And we see right now that that first task that was part of that list, week one, basic 2D shapes, is assigned and it's active
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Okay? So when I click on this right here, it will take me in
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and these are all of the different lessons. So it looks like there are six lessons that are a part of this
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And it tells me when it's due. So it's going to be due in three days
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And it tells me my percentage that I have completed and allows me to just start that task
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So this is great. I just had to go in one time and select what I wanted to assign to my kids And if you doing this if you know you know you want them to complete one specific grade level throughout the year
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you just have to do that one time. And it's really easy to just set that up and be done
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You don't have to go in every week and assign the different tasks. Now, it is really important that
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you stay on top of how your kids are doing and track the scores that they're receiving
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make sure that they're actually attempting everything. So you will have to log in and check those things
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And CTC Math has a great reporting feature. And I'll also show you the tools and what I use to do that
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But just keep that in mind that once you set it up
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you're going to want to check up on your kids. But this is a really easy way to get that entire school year planned really quickly
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So this new update is a great one. And I'm really excited to share it with you
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if you're considering using CTC math. I think that it will simplify the process of assigning tasks so much
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and it takes just a little bit more stress off of your plate
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Okay, so now that I share that with you, though, I want to talk to you about some of the other things I do
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as my kids work through CTC math to help me keep track of their progress
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and to use this program effectively. Okay, so I want to show you guys what I use to track our CTC math work
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and this I actually started using before they rolled out their new course planner
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So what I did is I went on CTC Maths site. I logged in and they actually have these sheets that you can print out to help you track
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the grade that you are working through. So again, before they had the course planner, we kind of had started in the middle of the
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year last year and I had my kids go through do their diagnostic tests and then we got to a level
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where I knew I wanted them to work and then I went through and I kind of set some goals. So
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for example, for my son, I printed off a sixth grade checklist and then also a seventh grade
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checklist because I know for the pace that he's comfortable working at and kind of the goals that we
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want to get get through. This year we're going to get through the sixth grade checklist and I want to
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make it through about half of the seventh grade work. So what I did, again, this is before the
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course planner, I went through and I counted the different topics that they have or the different
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lessons. And I figured out about how many lessons he would have to do per week to reach that goal
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that I had set. Okay. So then what I do every week is I went in, I would assign. I would assign
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So for him, it was seven lessons per week. And so I would go in and I would assign
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this many lessons to be completed over the course of that week. Okay
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So, and again, you can print off these checklists from CTC Math
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I will warn you that I doctored them a little bit because when you print them from their website
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they have a huge black area around the outside. So I didn't want to use that much ink
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I did go in and I removed the black in one of my editing programs
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But you can print those out. Maybe they will change that in the future
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I'm not sure. But, and again, you don't have to print these
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All of their data is online, and you can see it really easily
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But I, for me, with keeping track of three kids with this
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it's just easier for me to be able to have something on paper
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where I can see the goals. I physically have to go in and make sure that I'm looking at their grade
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And I just like having something where I can write everything down. Okay? So let's see. So then once the week is over, I go back in and I note the date that they completed
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that lesson and then whatever grade he scored. And this is where I can really tell if there's
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something that he didn't do very well on, then I would be able to go back and maybe reassign
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some lessons or maybe make up one of the question sets where we can target just a specific area
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that he needs help with. Now, I can go in and use the course planner for this. Right now
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I am still going in every week and assigning the different lessons that I want to do. That's just
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I've gotten kind of comfortable doing that. However, if I wanted to use the course planner and
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do it all at once, I certainly could. I would have to figure out for my situation what day I think
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he should be finishing the sixth grade work and I would set that as my end date for the six
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grade assignments and then I would have to go in and set the remainder of the lessons up for
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seventh grade so the seventh grade would start on the date we've finished sixth grade and so on
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okay so I just haven't done that yet again because that feature is really new and I already had
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these printed out kind of comfortable with what we're doing but it might be something I choose to do
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in the future it's really handy to note they have these checklists here for each of the grade so if you do
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like to keep track of things on paper or you want something for you know their portfolio you have
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something that you can easily print off and check each week okay the final thing that i use that i love
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that ctc math offers are their weekly revision sets these are weekly questions that you can assign
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automatically to your kids so they will get them as tasks each week and the questions reinforce
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key concepts they give some spiral review and basically help you help you help you
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ensure consistent progress So while I think CTC math is more of a mastery program there is this aspect of review which is great Okay so to add a weekly revision set you just go to tasks and then you going to find that right here If you hit the drop down you can choose which one of your kids you want
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to add that weekly revision set to, and then there are different options for what you want
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to do as far as the grade level and which problems you want to assign. Once they take those weekly
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like kind of like mini assessments, let's say I go to do
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here for Carly. And this is the reporting section. I can go to weekly revision. And this will give me
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just a breakdown of how she did on her weekly revision tasks. And the cool thing is that if you hover
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over the problems in red, these are the ones that she missed. It will pop up. It's a little slow
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right now, but it'll show what the question was that she missed, what her answer was, and what
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the right answer is. So you can kind of see pretty easily what they're missing and what they
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might need to work on. All right. So these will show up here. And then what you can do is
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let's say I wanted to have her redo this weekly revision set. I wanted her to get just a little
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bit better score on this or to practice some of these concepts. What you're going to do is go up here
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to tools. Okay, and this is where you're going to find your checklist like I talked about
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I had to ask about this because it's kind of hidden. I wanted to know how I could print off the weekly revisions for my kids if I wanted to have them redo something
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So if I go to, let's say, fourth grade, and then on all streams, that's where it is, the weekly revision tasks
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So if I click on that, right here, these are all of the different sets
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So I could go in, and I think it was set three, I don't quite remember, but if I click on set three, this will allow me to
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download a PDF of the worksheet so that I could print this off and have her work on it as a
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worksheet. We could work on it together and just review some of the concepts that she missed
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And I believe right here, if I go back, it will also show you the answer. So if you need an
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answer key, that is also there for you. All right. So this is just a great tool. Again, it's kind of
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I had to ask because I wanted to know, okay, if my kids aren't doing well on some of the weekly
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revision tasks, what's an easy way to go back and review those with them? And this is where it's
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going to be under tool. So I hope that is helpful for you if you want to use it. So what I'll do
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each week when I check their work, I'll look over their weekly revision tasks and record the
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score on my printouts. You can decide on what percentage you'd like your kids to hit. For me, I chose
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80%. So if they score less than an 80%, I'll, go in and print out the worksheets and have them redo it sometimes working through it with them
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It really helps to see if they were just making simple mistakes or had a simple misunderstanding
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or if they're really not grasping a concept, at which point you can then go back and reassign
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other lessons or create question banks as needed. All right guys, I'm going to leave you one more
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thing that might be really helpful for you to know if you're using CTC math and it's regarding
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how the kids are graded. Because when you walk you when you log in, you'll see that they have a percentage assigned to them once they start doing their work
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And I was really curious as to how that number was calculated, since there are so many things the kids are doing in CTC math between their lessons, their mastery problems, the ability to redo lessons, their weekly revisions, question banks, et cetera
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So what counted towards the grade and what didn't? This is not really explained on the CTC math website, so I reached that to them, and here's what I was told
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So this grade, what CTC math calls the efficiency rating, or ER, is calculated differently depending on your students' level
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So in kindergarten through sixth grade, this efficiency rating is an average of the students' three best attempts at the interactive questions
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And these are the questions that come after each lesson. This means that they can increase their grade by retrying questions and continuously scoring well
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Once they get to the seventh grade, they will. begin to have printable worksheets included in their lessons and this changes how the
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grade is calculated. At this point, the grade is a score out of 100 with the students first
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attempt having the heaviest weight towards their grade and each subsequent attempt having
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less weight. Subsequent attempts can also only cause the grade to increase or remain the same
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and this is to encourage kids to try to do better without worrying that their grade is going to
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drop. Their grade at this level is also frozen and after they have viewed solutions so that their grade is not influenced by a higher score that they achieve after looking at the answers
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I hope this information is helpful to you if you're curious about the grading like I was
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We are really enjoying CTC math. It's very affordable for homeschool families
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There are monthly or yearly membership plans available and they offer a half price discount which gives you access to all grade levels for all your kids at one low price. I'm going to leave a link to
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in the description so you can check it out, grab a free trial, and a special discount for homeschooling
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families. Thank you so much for watching. I hope this video is helpful for you. If you have any
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questions, please leave them in the comments and make sure to like, subscribe, and share with
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other homeschooling families. It really does help my channel out and help other people be able to
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see my content. I'll see you next time
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