Our family was given a generous one-year license for two students and one teacher to the MaxScholar Reading Intervention Programs – specifically, MaxGuru.

This is an online product only. I was sent via email a log-in for myself and set up accounts for my two sons, Daniel (6) and David (11). Daniel is as far as we know a “regular” student with no known learning disabilities. David has dysgraphia, a form of dyslexia which affects written expression. I was very interested in trying this program, because as we are working with David to advance in his reading and writing, we are also trying these similar approaches with Daniel so that we can hopefully avoid these same problems with him.

MaxScholar is a multi-sensory program. It has the children use their voices, the keyboard, and use their fingers in the air or on the touch screen. It’s researched based methods are intended to help students in the ares of reading, reading comprehension and writing.

One thing I noticed is that there was supposed to be a placement test of some sort, or so we thought, but neither boy was given an opportunity to take such a test, so I had them both start at the beginning and just begin working their way through the program.

Both boys are fairly tech-savvy, but both continually reported glitchy problems to me regularly. At times, the program just froze, sometimes certain features simply did not work. I really felt like I had no sense of direction for how to proceed through the program. Often, the only way to move to something different after completing a task was to use the back browser button, go to the original screen and choose the next thing.

One feature of the program is that you can point and have it read a sentence to you. In a few cases that I observed, it actually read the sentence wrong. That was very confusing to me, and to my son, Daniel. After that, instead of having it read the sentences to him, I sat nearby and read them. That was a drawback.

When Daniel (6) was working through the program and things were working correctly, he seemed to enjoy it. He was understanding and progressing through the letters and sounds. He seemed to enjoy the “tracing the letters and say the sounds” part of the program. But he would come to certain letters and they would not work. He is sort of a “rule-follower” so even though I would tell him just to skip the parts that were not working right, he was distressed by this and unable to continue.

David (11) was sort of bored with the whole process- I think this is primarily because he was doing work far below his age level and that was embarrassing and irritating to him. I tried to click around and figure out how to move him to more advanced work, but I spent quite a bit of time confused as to help him with it. I did not have tons of time for a huge learning curve on this. I do think now that we are on summer break, I may take some time to sit down and explore the program more and try to understand how David can use it. Since he is my son with learning disabilities, and this program is supposed to be designed for just such a student, I’d love for it to benefit him.

Both boys liked playing in the Max Music area of the program. At first, I did not see any harm in letting them play on it, and in fact David told me he was “highlighting the verbs” in certain music lyrics. Then, I took a closer look and realized these were not songs that I would generally find acceptable in my house.

Here is an example that my children could access from their accounts. In case you can’t read this picture, here is what the lyrics say:

• Instead of spending billions on the war,
• I can use that money so I can feed the poor
• ‘Cause I know some so poor
• When it rains they shower
• Screaming Fight the Power
• That’s when the vulture devours.

This is just one example of five or six songs similar to this that I discovered fairly quickly while exploring this section.

So, given that the program was glitchy and problematic, often had sections with tasks that neither the children, nor I could understand, and had these song lyrics that I would completely not have in my home. I would not recommend this program for young children at all.

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