Reading is a big part of home education, at least in our house, so when Read Live was made available to us as members of the Homeschool Crew I was pretty excited to try it out.
Like I said I was excited to try it out. Keeping that in mind, I tried very hard to project that excitement onto Cameron as we started using the system. The program itself is a great assessment tool and can have mulitple students. For this review I added both boys but focused on Cameron.
Before I get into our personal experiences with the program and how we will continue to use it, let me share some basic information about Read Live with you.
What is Read Live? Read Live is the web-based section of Read Naturally’s fluency intervention program.
What is the goal of the program? The main goal of fluency intervention is , help the student read as well as they speak, and make sense of what they read without stopping to decode words as they read.
What other areas are impacted by Read Naturally? Read Natually Live assists in the vocabulary development as well as reading comprehension. How much for Read Naturally Live cost? a subscription costs $149.00
What is included in the subscription? 12 months of access, 6 phonics levels, and 13 sequential curriculum levels oral fluency benchmark passages, teacher training videos online and great technical support
So now that you know the basic information on the program I can tell you about our experiences with the program and my personal thoughts on it.
I love the concept behind the program and signed up for it thinking it would help my struggling reader. I did an assessment with Cameron and found out he was miserable doing the assessment. We talked about what he didn't like about the program and what might have helped. A big thing for him was the topic of the assessment reading was not of interest to him so it made it very hard to read. Keeping that in mind I explained to him everything we read doesn't always interest us and sometimes we need to read something to see where we are and make sure we are at least reading at a level that is appropriate for us.
After the exchange and ordeal of the assessment I did find him reading a book that I had been trying to get him to read that was an appropriate grade level, so if nothing else the assessment pushed him to look at the books he was suppose to be reading.
We did go back and do another assessment this past week to see if he was improving or if there was something at that level we needed to work on some more. The good news was from the first assessment to this one there was a marked improvement in reading words per minute and correctly, although the assessment experience itself was not improved. (he still didn't like it) This time though he was able to explain to me that he really doesn't like reading on the computer screen and that he would much rather do any kind of assessments from a book instead of the computer screen.
I have downloaded the extras available and will be using printouts to do anymore assessments with him. He really is an old fashion kind of kid, while he likes playing some games on the computer, he would much rather learn out of a book or hands on. Lesson learned for Mom.
On a side note, Nathan my youngest saw us working in the program this last week and asked if he could give it a try. I told him we would give it a try "next week" which for those of you reading this review will end up being Thanksgiving week and beyond.
Since I have mentioned cost in previous reviews, I will mention it here. In now knowing that Cameron prefers to do testing in book format I don't think the Read Live subscription is a cost that I can justify for just 1 child if it does work for Nathan. Although, as a Mom and an lover of all things reading related I love the concept of the program and the interface with the program.
Check out what the rest of the Crew had to say about this program HERE
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