As I’ve mentioned before we have been loving the addition of a few new online learning platforms in our homeschool. The opportunity that MaxScholar has provided is another great program we’ve added. While neither of my kids have trouble with reading, I love finding programs that will help them grow their skills, for this reason, the MaxScholar Reading Intervention Programs are a great option for my kids during their computer time.
- All MaxPhonics
- All MaxReading
- All MaxWords
- All MaxMusic
- All MaxPlaces
- All MaxBios
- All MaxVocab
This is a ton of items so there is always something that perks their interest. My kids began with the MaxReading. This was a bit intimidating for them, as the reading pretest was set to level 8 at the beginning. This frustrated Sunshine and it took me a minute to figure out how to make it work at her level. After lowering the level (“Too Hard!” – button in the top right corner) to a level that was much better for her, she had no problem. But that initial frustration was hard to combat.
As she progressed through the pretest she had more and more fun. The learning games were interesting and kept her thinking. The simple layout and lack of extra items on the page, kept her focused and working through what was needed. When she had finish the pretest, it automatically figured out what level she should be working at and she was ready to start the program.
While working in the MaxReading program, she enjoyed reading the chapters laid out for her. I loved that the vocabulary words were highlighted and when rolled over showed the definition for the word. Making it easy for her to find the meaning and not pulling her off course.
The other activities in the MaxReading program were good and continued to help her grow in her understanding of reading for context. I will say, she was not very excited about the highlighting feature and even I felt like it was a bit much. We do narration at home, and she is wonderful with that, specifics and overall topic. She could easily tell me what she read, but highlighting the majority of the text felt like a bit much for her needs. However, that being said, I do like that it visually showed her what should have been highlighted, and if this were something I felt she needed more work on, this program would be the first place we headed to. It just wasn’t a good fit for Sunshine at this point.
One of the other sections we used quite a bit, was MaxMusic. Mister Man was especially excited about this section. He loves music and this was a fun way to combine phonics with music. Finding the parts of speech in the song lyrics was one of his favorite things to do. It was well done and easy for him to follow and he loved seeing the lyrics to the songs. He also loved playing the piano notes to the songs.
I wish there were other artists to choose from but the ones that were available were fun. Unfortunately, he did not know many of the artists/songs so it wasn’t as relevant as it could have been and he ended up doing the same artists more than once, because they appealed most to him.
The games and extras were also a fun way to work on different aspects of reading and phonics while keeping the kids interested.
Overall, I think the MaxScholar program is well done. It is easy for the kids to navigate and the programs and games are interactive and full of learning potential. We will definitely be using this program throughout the year, especially for the summer enrichment.
If you’d like to learn more about MaxScholar and the many options they have, take a look at the other reviews done by our Schoolhouse Review Crew:
