So exciting! My first review for the new Crew year!!!
So what is IXL?
It is the place to go to practice anything that your child is learning from grades Pre-K to 12.
IXL has personalized learning practice from learning your shapes and letters to calculus.
IXL describes itself as a comprehensive curriculum for grades K-12.
The subjects include Math, Language Arts, Science, Social Studies and even Spanish. Science and Social Studies don't begin until the 2nd grade.
For most of the lessons, your child needs to have already learned or be learning that specific skill. There are, however, things the child can learn from some of the lessons. For example.....
Your child could learn counting by using this program, but would need to be at least familiar with the concept of counting.
The same goes for long and short. If they have the concept down, they can practice and really start to understand the concept.
Now, in this lesson, it asks the child to find the letter c. Now the child could look at the letter and then look to find something that matches, but it would be best if the child had already learned, or is learning about the letters, and then use this as a way to keep practicing what they are learning.
In the below example you can see what I mean by the student would already need to know or be learning certain concepts before using IXL in that topic. If a child had no idea what fractions were, they would have no idea how to answer this problem.
There are no official lessons in this program, but if a child gets an answer wrong, it will explain the process of getting the answer. For example:
There is a Diagnostic Arena where your child can go to answer questions and see where their levels are and get recommendations.
In the earlier years you could use IXL to teach and practice. As you see in the above example of the younger stuff, you could easily teach it to your child with this program. For the higher grades though, they would have to already understand the concepts and use this to practice. Much more fun than worksheets!
Brently is 4 so we focused on Preschool. We practiced counting, tall and short, short and long, shapes etc... You can see how much there is to offer just in Math and Language Arts.
The program doesn't automatically talk to your child so they would either have to be able to read, have a parent read to them or know how to push the speaker button to have the program read the problem to them.
Once your child selects their answer the program will show a phrase saying things like Good job! You got it! Brilliant!. Unfortunately, this is the one thing that I wish were different because it doesn't say this out loud to the child. Unless you are there reading it to them, they won't know what it says.
Once the child has completed a section they receive awards!
There are even certificates that your child can earn that you can print out!
As the parent you can log in and see all of the child's awards and certificates.
Here are a few screenshots of some of the other, higher grade topics.
As you can see, there really is something for everyone and every age.
Brently really enjoys "doing his school"
"Me so smart at this"
I think the sections are broken into small enough sections to keep kid's attention and they don't go on so long that the child gets tired of it.
I can see using this daily or I could see using it on Fridays instead of your normal book school to practice everything you've been learning through the week. That is what is great about this program; the personalized learning.
Will we continue to use this program now that the review period is over? YES! I have looked through so much of this program to see what all it has to offer and it has a LOT!
I think the price is amazing. You can choose from several packages. If you just want to practice one subject, you can. Two? That's fine too. You can get the family membership that includes ALL subjects for only $19.95 a month, and it is only an additional $4 per extra child.
If I could make any changes to the program it would be that it automatically spoke to the child, or had an option to turn on the speaking so that younger children could more easily do this on their own and so that they could hear the praise they were getting when they got an answer correct. Other than that, I think this is a great program, and we will definitely be getting more use out of this program!
I am not the only one who reviewed IXL. Other families have used this program with different age groups as well. Be sure to see what others thought abot this program and how it worked for their families.
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