Review: MaxScholar Reading Intervention Program
MaxScholar gave us a one year’s license to their MaxScholar Reading Intervention Programs, MaxGuru. Their K-2 and MaxGuru programs are designed for students that struggle with dyslexia, learning disabilities, ADHD, processing problems, or who are struggling to learn to read. It’s also a great program for students without those added challenges as well.
We reviewed the MaxGuru program, so I turned Super D loose on it. It is a robust program, with lots of material for kids to work through. The MaxGuru program includes MaxPhonics, MaxReading, MaxWords, MaxMusic, MaxVocab, MaxPlaces, and MaxBio.
Super D started in MaxReading. I was eager to have a systematic way to gauge his reading comprehension. I’ll often ask him to tell me about a fiction book he’s reading, but I often haven’t read it myself, so I don’t know the level to which he’s understood the material.
In MaxReading, we took a placement test and began on Level 5. The exercise begins with highlighted words that he can click on to see the definitions. Next, they read the passage, and then highlight the Topic, Main Idea, and Details. The highlighting is fun – the students click on a particular colored highlighter and then click on the appropriate text.
After the students finish highlighting, they answer comprehension questions. Then they get a total score based on their highlighting and answering the questions correctly. We haven’t worked much on finding the topic, main idea, and details prior to this (our intensive language arts program begins in 4th grade with Essentials (Classical Conversations)), but he picked it up with a little instruction from me.
There are a lot of reading passages – level 5 had 5 different categories to choose from: Nobel Prize Recipients, City of Orchids, Medals, Animals, and Birds. Each category within those had 10 chapters to work through. There are 12 different levels in all, and Super D could easily work a level or 2 up or down.
Super D really enjoyed the games, especially Word Search. They also have Hangman and Definitions.
The other categories include
MaxPhonics where you learn letter sounds, etc.
MaxReading where you learn reading comprehension strategies
MaxWords where you learn about spelling, prefixes, suffixes, and Latin and Greek roots
MaxVocab where you get to play games with new words you are learning in the program
MaxBio is great for the history fans – you learn more about historical figures through reading
MaxMusic where you can learn about song lyrics and how to play them on the piano (I do wish they had a larger selection – although they picked popular artists, we didn’t know any of the songs! We’re a Christian music kind of family with a sprinkling of 80’s & 90’s country) The piano keyboard game was a fabulous idea, but the notes were played so quickly even I couldn’t copy them.
MaxPlaces where you use a cool interactive map to read about places around the world.
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