Learning Plus

My daughter has attended 2 years of the summer camp here and my son started last year. They both are not very enthused about school, but loved the camp. The teachers make learning fun and both my kids wished they could have gone to camp longer (I never hear that from them about school!!). The camp only goes through 8^th grade, so this will be my son’s last year in the camp. Below is what he wrote about his camp experience (reprinted with his permission):
«When I came to Learning Plus on the first day, I wasn’t so happy. But my experience here was amazing. I really liked all the activities we did in writing. I was really proud of my five paragraph paper on great white sharks. I learned how to really organize a paragraph, with topic, supporting, detail, and conclusion sentences. I was really behind in math, but now I think I’m getting better and better. I wasn’t really happy about all of the math homework, but I was able to get it all done, and I know it was to help me. Vocab was probably the most fun thing to do. I was proud of myself when I got good scores on the tests. I was also very proud of myself when I finished all of my lessons early, which helped me with my tests. If I could change anything, I would put in grass so we could play more games. This summer camp was one of the most fun summer camps I’ve ever been to. If you ever need help in school, you should come to this extremely awesome summer camp.»

My daughter spent several weeks in their «summer camp» this past summer and loved it. The teachers genuinely care about the students. The summer camp was divided up into small groups.
We’ll be back next summer!

Learning Plus is tucked away upstairs in a nondescript office building near Cambrian Plaza. They seem to have a good rapport with children and it seems to always be bustling with students, some in tutoring sessions and some waiting their turn. There are cubicles in the room and the children go off with their tutors for what seems to be increments of 30 to 45 minutes. Rates are $ 40 for a 30 minute session. After the sessions, the tutors can be seen making photo copies of worksheets which they then send home as homework. Hand-​written flashcards seem to be popular. Children seem to like being there and it seems many make good progress academically.
One negative is that there is no front desk person. Incoming calls go to an answering machine (and not even a voice mail service) which does not seem to be muted so anyone in the tiny waiting area can hear the messages as they are being left. The only way to communicate with Learning Plus is via phone. They do not have an email address and there is no one staffing a front desk, so therefore, the only thing you can do is call, and they usually do not pick up during business hours. This proves quite inconvenient when trying to change a time and/​or date of a tutoring session. They don’t always seem to have a handle on the master schedule. The other negative is that they only take checks, with payments due on a monthly basis.
If Learning Plus would take other forms of payment (Visa, Paypal) and have a dedicated front desk person to handle appointments, I would not hesitate to recommend them. But being a busy parent, I would prefer other payment options besides checks and I would prefer other modes of communication beside the phone (which usually is a one-​sided dialogue between the caller and the answering machine).

I 100% recommend Learning Plus. We started my daughter just before she turned 4 as she showed an interest in reading. She is now almost 10 months into the program and it is amazing how well she reads. She has fun, recognizes words now as we read other books together and picks out words on TV or signs or food packages.
My daughter goes once a week for 30 minutes and has homework each week that we work on throughout the week. I can’t speak to how well the older kids do with the tutoring but it has been a great experience for us and I would recommend them to anyone interesting in finding a tutor for their kids.

Uneven, but basically worthwhile. We have been at Learning Plus for about a year. My child enjoys the session and has made measurable progress. I like that they go back to the fundamentals and work systematically, step by step, to make sure that no errors of understanding go undetected. However, the materials are seriously dated and unattractive; the office is hot; and the tutors speak so loudly in their separate cubicles that there is a lot of hubbub. Also, they are Scientologists, though they have been very respectful of our religious boundaries.