Junior Kumon

Thanks for the tip about beestar. have never heard of it. My son does love to work on the computer. He has a time quota and I'm always looking for educational sites.

My daughter isn’t using Kumon. She is using beestar.org. Beestar is an online weekly exercise web site. I think beestar is cheaper than Kumon. What’s more important is that it offers many cute exercises on math, English language arts and so on. My daughter loves them very much. Maybe you can also try beestar. Hope that it helps you.
Lisa

Thank you for the insight. It sounds like the program will fit your needs. I have always been a bit skeptical of these programs so it is interesting for me to hear various opinions and reasons. In some ways I feel that we should be demanding these same results from our schools but I know that not all schools are up to par which is a shame. My 4 year old is in a full time day school with a good balance of academics, arts and play but I think we were very fortunate to find it (and make the list). Although he is in Pre-Pre-K, he is reading level 1 books and can do addition. Unfortuantely, he too is way above the leval they are teaching. While the school provides a solid foundation, we encourage him to work above the level but mostly with free library books and a simple white board :-). It is easy and he aks for it. He is very advanced for his age so it is nice to hear good comments about programs like Kumon in case we see the need in the future. Have you looked into Montessori programs? If we could do it over again, we would have put him in an early Montessori program. Children with advanced abilities, love of learning, and a curiosity about nature do well in programs like Montessori, Waldorf and Amelio Reggio. To be honest, I am very concerned about what we will do when he graduates from his current school (after K) because we already see that most of the public schools will not be advanced enough and the private schools where we live are prohibitively expensive. We are thinking about moving to where the good schools are actually!! Well, best of luck to you and keep us posted about your Kumon experience.

Thanks for sharing your experience. We are doing about 10 minutes of homework every night - 20 minutes is a little too long for my son's attention span at this point. Most of the children I have encountered also seem to really enjoy Kumon although being children, they complain about the homework.

My son went to an academic pre-K last year but I pulled him out after June because of several issues with the way the school was managed and also in my opinion the school was "too academic" with a very strong emphasis on reading and writing at the expense of any other activities including art, science and just playing. My son was already used to coming home with homework from his old pre-k (he started getting homework after turning 4 in April) but he was having a hard time with some of the homework that was frankly above the level of most children his age. So he was interested and wanted to learn but at the same time was getting turned off and discouraged by too much and inappropriate homework. So I decided to change his pre-k school (we only have a couple of options in our town) and looked into Kumon. I feel that Kumon will be more personalized to my son's learning need and interest than his old pre-k, but of course, these are all new decisions and changes and we'll have to see how things will turn out.