I love it when I find new and unique products to use in our homeschool, even if it’s only for a short while. If it’s something that covers more than one subject, well, that’s even better! Our family was given the opportunity to try Orphs of the Woodlands from Star Toaster. The recommended starting grade is 4th, so only my 3 oldest children used this. Subscriptions normally last for 2 months, but we were given access for 1 full year. Extensions can also be purchased if needed. This is an online program, and is like a story, learning, and a game all-in-one. The title of the book is The Treasure of Hightower https://andrikofarmakeio.com/generic-cialis/. One cool thing about the program is that many of the team members come form homeschooling families themselves. One team member is a teenager, and he did some of the coding, research, and even provided the voice for a character in the program.
IXL ~ A Schoolhouse Crew Review
Math and Language Arts are the basic foundations of learning, so it’s pretty important to learn and practice those skills as much as possible. I don’t think it’s possible to learn too much about these skills. What better way to practice, than to do so in a manner that feels like play? With IXL, that is entirely possible. Our family received a full year of access to IXL Math and IXL Language Arts. The Math portion is for grades Pre-K through Pre-Calculus, and the Language Arts portion is for grades 2-8. The pricing is as follows: a monthly subscription for 1 child and 1 subject is $9.95, plus $2 for each addition child. An annual subscription for one child is $79; for both subjects, the cost is $129. For this review, I used IXL with my 3 oldest children only.
The important thing to remember about IXL is that it’s not an actual curriculum, it’s for practicing skills that are being learned, or as a refresher of what’s been learned already. IXL is online and browser-based, so you do need internet access for it to work. At sign-in, you can choose which child will be working, or if you’re the parent, you would choose that option. Then depending on which subject is being worked on, you would go to Math or Language Arts, then the desired grade. Once you’ve chosen your grade, you then see all of the topics that are available in that grade. The Language Arts portion offers practice for almost 800 skills, and the Math portion offers more than 3,000 skills to practice. I seriously didn’t know that there were that many skills to learn! Thankfully, with the way it’s broken down by grade and topic, it’s not overwhelming at all. You can also view Common Core and state standards if you wish. To see a problem example for a topic, you can just hover over topic name, and a small window pops up. This is the 4th grade Place Values topic popup:
Question are presented one at a time…not several like a worksheet would be. When a question is answered correctly, you move onto the next one. When it’s an incorrect answer, however, you see something like this:
You can actually see what you did wrong, why it is the wrong answer, and what the correct answer is. You just click “Got It!” and it’ll move onto the next question. The sidebar on the right helps your child track their progress with how many questions they’ve done, how much time it’s taken, and what their SmartScore is. The SmartScore is proprietary to IXL, and helps measure your child’s mastery level of the topic.
When a skill is mastered, you’ll see a medal beside it on the topic list.
You can click on Awards at the top of the screen to see all of the medals and virtual awards that have been earned. These are Ethan’s from earlier in the review.
The boxes with question marks can be hovered over, and a pop-up window will tell you how to unlock that virtual reward. Both portions of the site work the same way. I just detailed the Math portion because that’s what we used the most of.
Under the Parent account, you can view the awards that each child has earned, as well as progress reports that will show skill or category performance, trouble spots, and usage detail for each child. These are pretty handy features to have.
I am really enjoying our IXL access. I just keep the computer signed in to our account, and each child can go find what they want to review, and they redo problems as many time as they want. Since it’s practice and not actual teaching, I don’t have to sit with the kids while they work. It doesn’t count against them since it’s practice. Ethan is very competitive, and so he would do the problems a few times over to see if he could beat his time. I love how easy it is to incorporate into a school day, because you can spend as much or as little time on problems as you want. I am also a graphics lover, so I love the fun pictures that you see when you win a new medal. If your child needs more practice, and you want it to be fun, check out IXL!
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