Stinky Kid Math - TOS Review

We love finding new ways of learning math, so a chance to review Stinky Kid Math by Stinky Kid Math was welcome.

Stinky Kid Math is an on-line subscription program that is designed as a supplement to your regular math studies, like a tutor or homework helper (just much more fun). It is packed full of videos, games and worksheets

Created by teacher Todd Matia with the purpose of helping kids engage with, understand and visualise math concepts. Todd covers the topics of Pre-Algebra, Algebra 1, Algebra 2, and Geometry - you can choose to watch the videos in that order or jump around different topics to match in with your studies (we jumped around).

Once you have logged in you click on the topic you wish to cover and it pulls up the videos, booklets and worksheets for the topic - it also suggests any games which relate to that topic.

The video lessons were a real hit (second only to the games), they are designed to present each concept in a clear and engaging manner. The smart boards and chalk boards in the backgrounds annotate the information in an easy to understand way and the teachers use fun examples to explain. My favourite aspect of the videos were they way they used real life examples as problems to solve. Each video varied in length, usually a couple of minutes long.

The books are basically a written chapter that covers the same material as the video. You can download them or just read on-line. We chose to download as it gave the girls something to take notes in and include in their math notebooks.

The worksheets can also be downloaded . They are a great way of checking the students really understood everything they covered. There is also an answer for each worksheet and they show the working out so if they get it wrong they can see why and where.

The games were the girls favourite section and really helped hone their skills. These were;

• Geometry Runner –a good old fashioned arcade style game where you run and jump to collect the correct geometric shapes.
• Geometry Playground – exploring and manipulating different geometric shapes.
• Shifter – matching shapes and colours by converting fractions, decimals and percents.
• Math-a-Mole –using graphing points to blow up mole holes on a golf course.
• Integer Game – a game show where you practise math facts. 

We started using Stinky Kid Math by following their advice and creating a notebook to record information from the videos.

We chose to use it to back up our existing math work rather than following the order so I picked topics to match what we were already learning that day, then playing the videos on our TV (it would have been just as easy to play them on-line but I chose the TV because it had a bigger screen) while they took notes either in their notebooks or on the downloaded and printed books, then they worked individually on the worksheets or played the games.

I was impressed by the content of the videos - they explained it in an easily understandable manner and started everything at the very basics. I found it worked really well as a group lesson for the girls as they all loved the videos. Lilly and Sunflower both worked on a couple of topics on their own online as some of the algebra lessons were too advanced for 6yo Rose (even though she still wanted to watch 'math TV' with her sisters). Overall its been a popular addition to our math lessons.

Stinky Kid Math is available for $9.99/month.

You can see what my crew mates thought over at the TOS Blog.