How We Use IXL In Our Homeschool (Review)

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If you are looking for peace of mind that you child is achieving their necessary milestones, IXL is a great addition to your homeschool. No matter the learning style that you are using in your homeschool, it can be very useful for helping you evaluate what skills your child is excelling at and where they need more work on. With only a few minutes per day, you can see how your child is progressing through the school year. We have thoroughly enjoyed our time reviewing the full annual membership for IXL from IXL Learning.

How We Use IXL In Our Homeschool. #IXL #IXLLearning #IXLLearningforkids

What is IXL?

IXL is a comprehensive K-12 curriculum that gives you an easy method to assess how your child is doing in math, language arts, grades 2-8 science, grades 2-8 social studies and intro Spanish. By answering questions in a personalized learning experience, you can find out their trouble spots in each skill area. The adaptive questions adjust to your child’s ability and provides the perfect level of difficultly as they are proceeding through the questions. Since grades K to 12 are included, there is no limitation and your child can easily work ahead as they progress through the skills.

When your child answers a question incorrectly, the program will tell them the correct answer and also show them and describe to them how to determine the correct answer.

IXL provides a smart score as your child progresses through questions. This helps them work towards achieving a score that is a combination of the number of questions answered, consistency and difficultly. Our goal is to achieve a smart score of at least 90 on each session. If we don’t, we add that to our list of skills to continue to work on.

How We Use It

After getting familiar with IXL for the first couple weeks, we have started to get into a good routine of using it for 15 minutes every day. We usually start our day with it at least 3 times per week, but ideally 5 days per week.

We started using it on our desktop and then later used it on our iPad. Both were equally convenient for us and we will continue using both depending on our schedule.

One session each week, on Monday, we work on the diagnostic arena. The diagnostic arena is where your child will answer questions and immediately start seeing their levels in each skill. The program will then show the recommended skills for them. By doing a few questions in this arena each week, it helps to keep their statistics up to date.

On Tuesday to Friday, we work on questions that are in the recommended section of IXL. This includes math and language arts skills recommended just for your child, based on what they have been working on. Each skill recommended is identified as one of three following types:

Quesitons “from the diagnostic arena”;
Questions to “try something new”; or
Questions to “keep at it”.

We will also work on a few science and/or social studies questions depending on what we are working on during the week.

The program will read some of the questions and answer choices to my son. I read any of the questions that are not read to him at this age.

Detailed Analytics

Through the analytics, I am able to easily determine the areas that my son needs to work on. As a parent, you have a user account that provides detailed analysis of your child’s progress. Usage details, including number of questions answered, time practising, questions by category, questions per day, progress in which skills, are all helpful for tracking.

There is also a summary of questions answered and scores for each. You can print a wide variety of reports so that you have detailed documentation on your child’s learning. There are even certificates and math and language arts awards for the child to work towards.

It is extremely helpful to be able to view what questions my son has answered and his score. I then plan lessons throughout the week that will help to cover the trouble areas that are identified.

The weekly emails from IXL Learning help to keep me informed on my son’s progress, his practise time and achievements. This will be an added benefit when he gets more independent.

Planning for Our Future

I am excited to keep using IXL from IXL Learning in our home. Over the past 6 weeks, IXL has been a wonderful addition to our homeschool. I hope to slowly depend more on the results from this program to tailor our weekly homeschool lessons. It gives me the comfort knowing that we are covering the required skills that we need to. I can then make up more hands-on lessons that tie into the areas that we need more work on.

Be sure to click here to read other IXL reviews from the Homeschool Review Crew.