We recently had the opportunity to review a one year online subscription to the Reading Intervention Programs from MaxScholar so here are our thoughts.

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Product Review of MaxScholar

About

MaxScholar is an Orton-Gillingham based program that helps students to learn phonics and improve their reading skills. Orton-Gillingham is an approach (or a powerful tool – not a method or technique) to teaching that is intended to be used with people who have difficulty with reading, spelling, and writing that may be associated with dyslexia. The program allows you to adjust levels, restrict access to programs, and access to materials to reinforce it.

How We Used It

I decided to test this program with my seven year old daughter, Miranda, as she is still learning to read at her own slow and steady pace. She does sometimes get lowercase “d” and “b” letters mixed up, but some of my other children have done that as well so I am not concerned, but I was curious to see if this program would help with that in some way.

Miranda was doing other required homeschool during the review time so I could only get her on this program about three times a week on average.

In “MAXPHONICS”, the program gave her a test in the beginning to see what level she was at with phonics. After the testing, she had passed Module 1 Pre-K (Consonants and Short Vowels) and Module 2 Alphabet (Consonants and Short Vowels II), so she was put in Module 3 Blends (Consonant Blends). I felt this was an accurate assessment of where she was at.

I liked that the other Modules are “locked out” so that she could focus on what she needed to do..

We did click in to the MAXREADING part of the program, but the pretest looked like this:

As she has been reading mostly picture books with few words on the page, this was overwhelming to her. Miranda did not want to try the test out for the review. I have not been pushy with my children and reading and this has worked out very well for me with my older four children, so I chose to put her needs first here, instead of my need to review the program.

So, each day, she would click on the MAXPHONICS part of the program and do her lesson.

She loved the sand drawing part of the program. You see the letters in the sand and use your mouse to trace it.

After it is traced, it shows the letter clearly as in the photo above.

She also traces the letter while it is in the word to see how it is used as in the photo above.

After she did her blend lesson, she would go back to the main screen. As you can see in the photo above, there was more down lower on the screen under her Modules.

If you select CLOVER, it would take you to a screen that would teach about syllabication, and rules about that. For example, in the word “clover” you needed to have a vowel in each syllable section, so you would get “clo” and “ver”.

If you select SPELLING RULES, it takes you to a module that taught spelling rules. For example: “for one syllable words with a short vowel that end in f, l, or s, double the final f, l, or s.”

Miranda loved the GAMES section and always wanted to play that first, but I wouldn't let her until she had done the other parts, then she could do the game.

The game choices were “Memory Game”, “Word Builder”, “Space Rhyming” and “Words Within Words”.

She liked them all. I noticed she was especially good at the Memory Game. You could select the level of difficulty and then play.

In this Memory Game, at her Module 3 Phonics level, her game had her match the blend, (“sh” in photo below) to how it was used in a word (“ship” in photo below)

So she was learning even while having fun playing a game.

There are options in the teacher dashboard that allow me to let Miranda access other programs as well. Other reviewers will have more details for those parts of the program for the review, like MAXREADING (which helps them with reading), MAXMUSIC (which offers music related learning), MAXWORDS (which helps build vocabulary and has more spelling), MAXVOCAB (which helps build vocabulary even more), MAXPLACES (which includes geography to help practice reading comprehension) and MAXBIOS (which gives biographies of famous personalities). You can read all about those parts of the programs in other reviews by clicking the banner below to read other reviews from Crew Members.

Miranda's Opinion

“I liked the games. My favorite game was the card game, the memory game.”

My Opinion

I don't know if it was this program or if it was just a matter of time, but when Miranda was reading (physical books that we have in the house) out loud to me, I noticed that she is much better at knowing which lowercase letter is a “d” or “b” and sounds them out appropriately now. She still has trouble when drawing these letters and will ask me, “which side does the stick go on?” But it is an improvement. I have noticed that she has now memorized some of the blends and I think that was due to this program.  She is excited to try out even more parts of the program soon.

How To Find Them

• Website: http://maxscholar.com/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/maxscholarllc?lang=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MaxScholarLLC/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/maxscholar/

The Old Schoolhouse Homeschool Review Crew has a great team of people that have also used and reviewed this online subscription from MaxScholar so click the banner below to see all the reviews:

Thanks for stopping by! I look forward to sharing more great curriculum reviews throughout the coming year.

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