For the last few months, my daughter and I have been participating in the Kaplan Test Drive hosted by Mom Central. Kaplan is an online tutoring program for children in kindergarten through 8th grade. In the last few weeks we have gone through the registrations and learned how to navigate the site. It has been a fun process and wasn't difficult at all. My daughter has always struggled with reading and I have tried dozens of different things, but nothing has worked as well as Kaplan.
Both my daughter and I have our own user names and passwords. So she can go online whenever she wants and can practice both math and reading. And I can log on to see what she has accomplished. The first step was for her to take an evaluation test to see where her strengths and weaknesses are in both reading and math. She was lead through a variety of multiple choice questions with varying levels of difficulty. She was determined to be at a third grade level, even though she's in fourth grade now. So over the next few weeks, every time we had extra time, I let her log on to Kaplan. The activities are set up more like games than school work, and this really encouraged her to want to do it. She would stay online about a half hour to an hour at a time. The questions offer multiple choice answers and explain the correct answer whether she got in right or wrong. Their are stories to read and questions about reading comprehension and in the math section they practice things from adding to fractions. After several weeks of practice, her reading and math levels have both improved. She's not all the way to a fourth grade level yet, but I am confident that with a little more practice and Kaplan's help, she will be able to achieve this goal.
All in all, I was very pleased with the whole Kaplan experience. They have made learning fun for kids and its easy for the parents to track the children's progress. And as an added bonus, they also offer a reward zone for the kids. The more they accomplish, the more points they can accumulate. They can trade in their points for sweepstakes entries or even save them up and trade them in for things like Amazon gift cards. This really helps the program to pay for itself in even more ways than one. I definitely plan on continuing my subscription with them after the test drive is over, I hope my readers will will consider Kaplan if you find that your own child is struggling.
***I wrote this review while participating in a Test Drive Program by Mom Central on behalf of Kaplan and received the products necessary to facilitate my review. In addition, I received a gift certificate to thank me for taking the time to participate***
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