Teacher Reviews
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This is a well-executed single-purpose word-completion app that does a good job helping budding spellers review and hone basic spelling. With stickers and rewards, it is a real attention-holder, and help learners graduate up to harder words. Game play is simple and consistent: You see a word (3-6 letters long) with one or two missing letters, and four choices to fill the blank below. A cute drawing illustrates the word, and the word is said aloud in a young child's voice. Tapping an incorrect choice brings back the child's voice to offer random snippets of encouragement. Learners will eventually hit the correct answer through process of elimination, but the easily-frustrated can skip to the next item. You get a virtual sticker for each 5 correct items. The questions keep coming indefinitely and, while it's hard to be sure, I got the sense that there are about 100 to 120 flashcards in the deck. The app keeps a running count of right and wrong answers, and there's a countdown feature which lets you try to answer as many questions as you can in 1, 2 or 3 minutes. The settings allow two types of game play: missing letter and missing phoneme, the major difference being that the missing phoneme can be one or two letters. There are low and high skill levels as well, the difference being that low only has one blank, while high has two. However, given that the two-letter answers seem to be randomly paired letters (kq, dq, jr, etc.) it's not clear how this makes the exercise any more challenging. The use of a child's voice for the word prompts and feedback messages is a good idea in that it probably makes the app more approachable and less threatening to young users.
Family Activities
Test your own spelling abilities while encouraging your child to learn new words by having your child read challenging words (with the use of a dictionary, if necessary) and have you spell it out! Afterward, you can discuss the meaning of these new big words.
