To make studying fun and productive is pretty much the holy grail for educators and parents everywhere. This is what the SpellingCity app promises. It aims to help children build their English vocabulary and improve their spelling and writing skills while playing word games. It’s based on their well established and award winning web site of the same name. It was also the 19th most popular educational app as recommended by Kidslox users (out of over 150 suggestions) in our educational app survey.
What’s inside the app?
The app is a game-based educational tool available for iOS and Android platforms. The design is simple but colourful, friendly and more than fit for purpose.
The student chooses which words they’d like to learn from a number of lists. The lists are organised by topic, with age appropriate groups available starting from K-1. Once they’ve selected a word list, the child chooses a learning activity game. These range from classic hangman to alphabetising tasks and games involving unscrambling words and sentences through to quizzes that test the child understands a word’s meaning. Once the word list and game are chosen, the child gets to work on their vocabulary and spelling skills. The app also includes an audio playback component so the child can hear the words being pronounced correctly.
Is it really educational?
The app and play store reviews reveal that many users on both platforms find the app very helpful. Kidslox users seem to agree as they mentioned it a number of times as a recommended educational app during our survey. It seems like it has a lot of potential especially in a school or homeschooling context
Recently we were trying to determine what exactly makes an app “educational”. And it seems like SpellingCity meets our criteria. It engages the child with learning and task solving activities, teaches something new and helps to get practical and useful knowledge. It doesn’t distract the child with advertisements. It’s free of charge but with the option to get a Premium account which opens up more games and wordlists.
Overall, I was very impressed with the games in SpellingCity. They achieve a good balance of being fun and engaging, but with clear educational objectives. I especially liked the vocabulary focussed games.
My son’s review
My second-grader says, “I like the game very much. I want to play it again”. I’ve not heard anything like that from him before when it came to his English assignments. So I think that’s a pretty strong endorsement!
