Friday, March 9, 2012

K5 learning review

We  were so excited to try out K5 learning (http://www.k5learning.com/) for 6 weeks and to give a review.  My main reason for giving this program a try was to try out the math curriculum since I haven't found one that we love.  I was also interested in the assessment, wondering where Reef would place in reading and math.
So, the first thing Reef did was take the assessment.  Honestly, I didn't love it.  It seems like all grade levels get the same test, so as a kindergartener, there weren't many questions he knew the answer to.  On those, he just picked an answer and moved on.  Because there were so few questions he could answer, I'm not really sure how they calculated his grade level.  Anyway, he tested into late kindergarten for both reading and math.
When we started the lessons, reading was WAY too easy, so I emailed the company, and they fixed it right away.  I was pretty happy with all of the reading lessons.  The program introduced a lot of new things like fact/opinion, true/false, synonym/antonyms. 
We had a little more issues with math.  The lessons were too easy in the beginning, but I didn't have him bumped up because I thought the review would be good.  But then they started moving too fast, and I didn't feel they spent enough time on certain things (adding 2 digits, money, fractions).  Reef got frustrated on those lessons.  I also missed the pencil and paper aspect of math, especially since we still need to practice writing numbers.
Reef's opinion of the program was positive.  He LOVES doing stuff on the computer and asked to do the program daily.  He preferred the math lessons over reading and loved it when he earned games.  I think more games would be good rewards in the program.
Since my trial was for 2 kids, I also signed Jonas up for the pre-K level.  He was so excited to have his own computer time.  The lowercase letter recognition lessons and counting lessons were really great.  I could tell that Jonas was really learning.  My big complaint was the introduction of sight words (hard ones like down and up!) in the middle of the letter introductions.  How is he supposed to do sight words when the whole alphabet hasn't been introduced!
Overall, the K5 learning program just didn't fit what we're looking for.  We didn't need a reading curriculum and that was the strong suit of this program in my opinion.  As much as Reef loves computer, I just don't think it's the right place to do math for us.

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