Awesome App

What We Liked:

Every homeschooling family with young children has at least one set of magnetic alphabet letters or tiles. Keeping track of these letters, particularly with toddlers in the house can be quite tricky, so Word Wizard seemed like an answer to prayer for me. It is so much more than a magnetic letter set though!

The unique text to speech mechanism allows children to both freely play with letter combinations and to practice building meaningful words in structured spelling practice.

This app has huge potential if you are teaching with phonics – you can sit down with a child and segment out simple words together, and explain more complex spelling rules as your child grows by showing how the sound of the word changes as new letters are added. I love that you can create your own customized spelling list as well.

My daughter loves the animation screen and is very motivated to work through a few lists of ten words each so that she can enjoy different animations that she can draw and play with when she is done.

The dictation (the app asking your child to spell a word and then having them build it) approach to spelling is incredibly effective and time-tested. This is a truly innovative, new tech way to use this technique with your children and keep them interested in the entire spelling/word creation process.

What We Didn’t Like:

This app would be even more incredible if it included some statistics, tracking, and reporting functions that would let you have multiple children using the app whose spelling results it would keep track of as each list is completed. As it is, you have to assign a list, and then hope you can get a hold of the results screen before your child dives into the animated reward segment of the app. My daughter did mention that the voice is a bit unclear at times. Computer speech generation has come a LONG way, but you can tell it’s still computer generated and a little bit off.

Overall:

Throw your remaining motley crew of alphabet magnets away – Word Wizard is here! Whether you are teaching the alphabet, spelling, or reading with phonics, Word Wizard is an app you should definitely add to your list of must-haves for the grade school years.

Disclosure: I received a promo code to download this app.

Appsforhomeschooling.com about Word Wizard for Kids School Ed, v1.2