Looking for some help for your kids with Spelling? Do you have a child that struggles with remembering their words? Try Big IQ Kids which won the TOS 2011 Blue Ribbon Award!
Big IQ Kids is a free online site, that your kids log into and do daily assignments, and tests for vocabulary and spelling. These lessons are not extensive and time consuming. They only take on average 10-15mins a day. The best part, they send the parent an email to keep you up to date on their progress.
To answer your next question.. yes you can merge this with your current curriculum. You can customize your child’s work, or you can use Big IQ Kids pre-loaded lessons.
It has 40 pre-loaded lessons for K-adult..or you can load your own words, and it will generate a week’s worth of lessons, quiz’s and tests. I was not a huge fan of the lists they had, they didn’t seem to flow well. Therefore I put our own in. Monkey Man & Middle Monkey are two different kids when it comes to spelling. Monkey Man has a hard time with sounding them out, and getting the correct letters, so he has to work a bit harder during the week or remembering them. We do a few things like sentences, puzzles, and word tiles, but he still fights me to learn them sometimes. Not anymore… He loves getting on Big IQ Kids and doing the lessons they have for each other. Best part? His Spelling test scores have come up drastically! 
Middle Monkey while she doesn’t really need the extra help to do good on her test, she still enjoys the lessons, as an incentive.
On their Premium site they also offer Math and Geography. Math is not a bad struggle here, but we still have our days when we could stand to strengthen our skills. Monkey Man, doesn’t enjoy learning the multiplication tables, and so this is a great way to do it, without the torment. One feature I really like… is that you can go in and edit the settings and choose how much of a certain thing you want them to concentrate on. So like for Monkey Man, I have him doing 25 questions of just single digit multiplication to help strengthen those numbers.
For Middle Monkey its focused more on double digit addition and subtraction.. cause she doesn’t like the whole carrying numbers. Am I saying the tears are completely gone now?? No, but they certainly are far and fewer between. Which is always a plus!
Geography is really cool too. They start with having you pick a state and learn about it. Gives you facts and then the child has a multi-choice quiz at the end. Each day it asks you where states are and helps you to find them. Monkey Man really enjoys this feature as he is a geography fanatic. Middle Monkey has really retained a lot of the capitals too. I think this is a great fun tool, to help just reinforce the memorization of them.
So to recap.. as a parent my favorite parts of this program …
- You can use it with any curriculum you are using.
- You can edit the difficulty and what you want to focus on for all subjects
- You can add your own words for spelling
- It emails you a progress report each day with what they need help in, or what they have mastered.
Each day when they finish each category they get a coin. The coin can be used to play fun educational games for extra incentive as well. They get to form a Big IQ Buddy. So they can make it resemble them!
Looking to try it out? You can use the Big IQ Kids Spelling absolutely for FREE.
To add on the Math it is a Monthly fee of $9.99 or a yearly fee of $49.99 (which breaks down to 4.17/month)
To add on the Geography it is a Yearly Fee of $39.99 (which breaks down to $3.13)
If your child is struggling in any of these, I truly think this is a great addition to any curriculum to help. The cost can be a bit steep if you have more than one child, but it is absolutely worth it!
Both of my Monkey’s say “They LOVED this program”.
You can find Big IQ Kids on Twitter and Facebook.
Check out what more TOS Crew are saying about Big IQ Kids..
* I was given a free membership in exchange for my honest review.
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