Kids A-Z

I have been using the app for a few years now. Initially introduced by the school district, now I pay for the plus subscription. It has been a wonderful tool until the recent upgrade. While the aim of the new upgrade might have been for students to access to a collection of books at their grade level and support the needs of both teachers and students, the new upgrade fails to consider that even at the same grade level, a level G book may have different requirement for vocabulary, word counts, plot understanding and concept understanding than a level K book. The level of performance and understanding for a child who just enters the 3rd grade would be very different from the same child at the end of the 3rd grade. Hence by giving a hodgepodge of books claimed to be“at their grade level", the new upgrade cannot pinpoint for teachers and kids to know exactly where the needs are. The new upgrade thus loses the advantage of tracking the exact level for teachers and students. If a student happens to choose a more difficult book in the grade level, reading can be daunting and frustrating; and if he/she chooses a very easy book at the grade level, he/she won’t be challenged. The just right amount of challenge for learning is completely lost in the new upgrade. And I don’t see why teachers and parents would continue to use the program vs just getting Kindle books. And in all honesty, without the new upgrade, I was happily paying and using the program. And the previous program with the leveled books icon already supported the needs for growth for students and they are reading at their grade level. I don’t see where exactly this upgrade have improved and it feels more like a downgrade for efficiency of locating a book at students’ true reading level vs a gross grade level where you don’t know exactly how many words and home much vocabulary they could handle.

I’ve been using Headsprout and RazKids for almost ten years in my classroom. In the past year it has gotten very buggy. It freezes while loading, crashes, or in Headsprout it started returning students to the screen where they need to select Headsprout or the book room after every single activity. It’s great when it works but lately it doesn’t, not on the app or browser (safari or chrome) on iOS, not on PCs in Chrome. Updates haven’t fixed anything and it seems to be getting worse. Students understandably get so upset when it freezes and they lose their progress and it wastes my time to try and troubleshoot and find workarounds. FIX THE SOFTWARE. We use other apps and software without issue and school subscriptions are reevaluated yearly. There’s no need to spend money if it doesn’t work. UPDATE: Instead of fixing Headsprout or incorporating it into their counterintuitive and obsolete the day it was released Foundations A-Z program, they shut it down. Headsprout was the best thing they ever put out and the reason is that they bought it from another company. I’m done with it. Reading Eggs is a pretty good replacement, but I will miss using Headsprout since it was a good supplementary program with a different and complimentary teaching order that really taught students to read.

The latest update to the user interface removed the rocket ship tracking my kids reading progress. Instead replaced it with a circle and number of activities left. This change is not a good one. My kids loved seeing the visualization of their hard work and got very excited when they “leveled up” which is no longer get there. Also, why does it only count books accessed through the “level up!” button and not through the “reading room” button? My daughter read lots of books through the reading room but didn’t get credit for them when she went into level up!

This app was the system my son and I used to improve his English reading by 40% in 1 school quarter. This app is better than the others because it has reading levels that tailor to child’s reading level, it has an audio book option, key word definitions at the end of book, questions at the end of each book to check on comprehension, and a reward system that motivated my son to read. I remain involved in my son’s learning by having him read to me to ensure he was putting forth a proper effort, but it is great having questions with multiple answers at the end of the books instead of me trying to think of good questions. I was told by his 2nd grade teacher that because he is ESL his English reading was behind by half a grade. My son has used this app via DODDEA schools daily and twice on weekends to get caught up. I only wish DODDEA would have kept the contract with RAZ Kids so we can continue to use it.