There are times during our homeschool day while I am working one on one with each child that I need something for the others to work on independently. Over the last several weeks we have had an opportunity to use and review the annual membership of IXL from IXL Learning and it has been wonderful for Lily, Christian, and Emmie's independent learning time.
We reviewed IXL way back in 2012 and they have made some big changes since then. When we reviewed it the only subject it covered was math. Now IXL covers math and language arts skills for grades pre-k-12, science and social studies skills for grades 2-8, and even introductory Spanish.
IXL is an online course that is accessed by your web browser or by using the IXL app (math and language arts only.) You can create a family account for multiple users, including a parent acoount and then create a secret word for each child to be able to log in.
When using IXL, each child has access to all of the available grade levels in all of the areas. This is a wonderful feature! Children who need work on 1st grade language arts and second grade math can do that easily. Or if your child is struggling in an area and you want to build their confidence you can have them working in a lower grade level.
You do not need to complete the topics in any particular order. You can pick and choose the skills your child needs to work on. There is a diagnostic you can do that can tell you where they need to start but I did not use this feature. IXL does not teach the skills, it is used to reinforce what the child already knows. I knew the areas my children were weak in and what I wanted them to work on so I had no need to use the diagnostic. The parent can star certain topics for the child so it highlights for them what they need to work on or let them choose their topics themselves.
After completing a certain number of questions the children earn awards and certificates. My children think it is a lot of fun to see what they will win next.
I used IXL math and language arts with my 2nd, 4th, and 6th graders. The first few times we used the program, the children wanted to keep going until they hit 100 percent, but if you get a question incorrect you loose points so it was taking a long time and causing some frustration to try to get to that hundred. So I had them work for a certain length of time, 15 minutes in math and 15 minutes in language arts instead and it worked much better for us. The program keeps track of where you left off so if you leave a certain skill area you can go back to it a later time. Each day I chose the subject area, made sure they understood what they were supposed to be doing, and then they were able to work on their own. Emmie (2nd grade) is not a very strong reader yet, but there is a read to me feature that she could use if she could not read the question herself. If the user gets an answer wrong, they get a detailed explanation showing how to get the answer correct.
At the bottom of each page they are working on, there are suggestions showing what the child should work on if the area they are attempting is too challenging.
In the math sections I had the children work on areas they are weak in or places I knew extra practice was needed. My 4th grader was having a hard time with rounding numbers and working on those sections in IXL has helped her to understand it much better. For language arts, I picked some topics that our current curriculum did not cover but are great skills to work on that did not require teaching, just a brief explanation of what they were supposed to do. For example: Christian was recently working on determining the order of events in informational texts and matching cause and effect in informational texts. Lily was working on identifying similes and metaphors, and Emmie on rhyming words.
Parent reports give you detailed information on each of your children. You can see how much time they have spent each day, what they have been working on, scores, progress and improvement, and their trouble spots.
I love how easy it is for the children to use IXL independently. The parent reports make it so easy for me to see exactly how they are doing. I love that you have access to all of the available grade levels and all of the subject areas and that the program allows you to work at different grade levels for different subjects. We have enjoyed using the language arts and math portions of IXL and have browsed some of the social studies and science sections as well. I think the geography questions would be great review for some of the things we have learned and I may use some of the plant sections while we are studying botany in science.
To see what my Crew Mates had to say, stop by the Crew Blog!
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