Elephant Learning Math Academy Review–What You Need to Know

Disclaimer: This post is sponsored by Elephant Learning Math. I received access to their app in exchange for an honest review.

For a while, I had seen the ad for Elephant Learning Math Academy pop up in my social media feeds. I was intrigued by this program that boasted it could help your child gain a full year of math in three months. I was even more intrigued when their age range started at just 2 years old. When the opportunity to review their program came up, I took it.

After all, a solid understanding of math is crucial to success. Regardless of what field of study you enter, basic math is necessary for everyday life.

What is Elephant Learning?

Elephant Learning Math Academy is a program that was designed by Dr. Aditya Nagrath and Dr. Alvaro Arias to help change the way mathematics is taught.

Elephant Learning works by presenting children with mathematical puzzles to solve. Based on the child’s answer they will progress or be given more problems of a similar nature to solve.

The goal is to increase a child’s mathematical understanding so they are not just memorizing math facts, but know how to use and apply mathematical concepts.

Learning Your Elephant Age

Once you have set up your child’s account, they begin by taking a placement test. The Elephant Age is how your child compares to other children outside of the program. This gives you a starting baseline and age to use to measure progress.

From there it is recommended they practice ten minutes, three days a week. For my children, I capped their weekly time at twenty minutes. Once they reached this, the app would tell them their limit had been met for the week and wouldn’t let them continue.

I really like that aspect. The only downside was sometimes they would get distracted and even though they were not actually engaged, the time still ran.

Playtime on Elephant Learning Math

During “playtime” children can choose a theme. There is a plethora from which to choose. Switching themes does not change the problem being asked. This would frustrate Lenora, (who turned three during the review), at times because she was done doing that type of problem and wanted to do something else.

They do have the option to skip problems they don’t know.

Supervision Required for Younger Students

For Lenora, the desktop version wasn’t an option because she couldn’t control the mouse properly. She did okay using the app on my phone, but I definitely had to supervise.

Sometimes, I wasn’t really sure she really understood what she was being asked or if she was getting it right accidentally.

Mostly, she liked she could make it do stuff. For example, if they asked for six unicorns, she liked adding the unicorns to the screen and then touching them to make them disappear.

For Lenora’s age, this was not something I could just hand her. Olivia (6) and Ellawyn (11) were fine navigating it on their own.

Elephant Learning Supplements

There are a few tools available for parents to help students outside of the app. They come in the form of worksheets, reports, history, and the ability to play in parent mode to see the questions troubling them.

Elephant Learning Math is Not A Stand Alone Program

It is important to note this is not a stand-alone curriculum. It is meant to work as an aid to help your child improve their math skills. They will still need a regular math curriculum; however, they may progress more quickly while using this program.

Elephant Learning is meant to bridge gaps in a child’s math education and strengthen skills so they have a firm foundation upon which to build.

What We Thought About Elephant Learning Math App

The requirement of only ten minutes three days a week was both a pro and a con for us. On one hand, it was nice it didn’t take up much time. On the other, the fact it was only ten minutes made it easy to forget. Ellawyn frequently forgot to work on it, even if I reminded her. Part of this was due to the fact this program works best on a touch screen, which we don’t have. And it only works with certain browsers, which our school laptops didn’t have. This left only my phone and my desktop as options.

My kids were expecting this to be like other math game apps. It is important to note this is not that. The reason it’s recommended to use in a short time frame is it’s meant to be mentally challenging and not entertaining.

My kids did make progress during the review. Lenora improved the most going from an Elephant age of 3.0 to 3.5. While this isn’t a full year in three months, she just turned three in October, so this means she is still half a year ahead from using this program.

Consistency is key when using Elephant Learning Math. Lenora was the most consistent because I was doing it with her and she improved the most. Improvement for the other two was in direct correlation to the amount they used it.