How will students benefit?

Kids don’t mean to lose their homework lists, but it isn’t uncommon. If you help your kids scan their spelling lists into this app as soon as they get them, kids will never find themselves without their study material. We’d recommend that parents assist with this step to ensure accuracy and help with ensuring recorded sentences use the words correctly.

Armed with the word lists on their (or your) mobile device, kids’ll be able to fit in a quick bout of study whenever they have a chance, such as on journeys or when waiting around. This will leave them free to do other things when they have other options.

Kids with their word list secure on a device won’t have to face the embarrassment of asking their teachers again for a new list nor risk having to do a test without having had the opportunity to revise properly.

The words included by the app are accompanied by a sentence which uses the term. This is very welcome because it avoids kids from misunderstanding the question and thereby correctly spelling the wrong word. When this happens, it can be very demotivating, so it is good to see the app take steps to avoid this situation.

The games might not have the graphical effects that kids are used to from entertainment titles or even other educational apps, but they play well and achieve their purpose of varying how kids practice the words. The games include the perennial favourites of word searches and hangman.

How will parents’ benefit?

Parents and kids are used to receiving lists of words from teachers to learn, but most apps rely only on their internal word lists. Incorporating word lists from teachers seamlessly with this app has many benefits.

• Organisational—once kids have committed the words to this app, they can’t be lost
• Ease of use—adding the word list is as easy as taking a photo of them
• Cost-effective—the app has times tables and arithmetic learning sections as abonus which may save an additional app purchase

Spelling Bee provides excellent feedback that parents can use to see how many words children got correct. Perhaps more importantly, the app also shows the answer entered by kids so that parents can spot the types of words their children most frequently get wrong. Knowing that kids often get ie/ei mixed up, for example, will let parents concentrate on helping their kids with this difficulty.

How will teachers benefit?

Spelling Bee is most at home on a family device where it can support kids as they learn spellings and engage parental support more effectively, but this has benefits for teachers. Using the advantages of features only an app can provide alongside kids’ preference for technology over paper, this app makes it more likely that teachers’ students will learn the set words.
Even if teachers don’t directly purchase or use this app, it is one that they could usefully recommend to parents and students.

What can Spelling Bee Games & Tests app improve on?

After a short while of using the app, it begins to ask for the user to leave a review. While it is understandable that app developers of a useful product like Spelling Bee want their users to give feedback, nagging for reviews isn’t something that suits an educational app.

We’d rather see the prompt for reviews go behind the parental lock. This move would be beneficial for the app, too, as kids tend to leave reviews that reflect frustrations not caused by the apps in question. Parents will leave a more considered review that reflects how well the app has met their child’s educational needs.

The app could add an error check for scanned words by comparing them to an in- built dictionary. If it highlighted any that do not match, it would help parents spot any words that have not been scanned accurately.

The app’s website could usefully incorporate some example lists so that parents anticipating homework lists but don’t yet have any can try out the list-building features in advance. A few of these themed around specific letter patterns or topics would also provide helpful practise for kids.

Spelling Bee’s presentation is clear and supports the app’s use, but it isn’t as flashy or full of graphical flourishes as other apps. This lack of glitz could be a pro or a con depending on the tastes of you and your child.

Good to know

Although it is much easier to enter a spelling list into the app by taking a photograph, it is possible to enter it manually. Having kids type in words is a helpful activity for learning to spell, but we’d recommend not to do this for inputting the teacher-set ones because incorrectly entering them could lead to kids learning erroneous spellings. Only enter the terms manually if the photo recognition does not work.

To be safe, double-check that the app has recognised the words correctly. If they are handwritten or printed using an ornate typeset, errors might appear. During this review, the word recognition was accurate.

Spelling test practice is untimed, while arithmetic exercises report how long kids take to complete them. This makes sense as kids need time to think with spelling, whereas fluency is important with times tables. In England’s year four multiplication tests, for example, kids need to be able to answer a question in about four seconds.

How much does Spelling Bee Games & Tests app cost?

Spelling Bee is free to download with reduced functionality. In-app purchases unlock the rest of the app if you need the functions they provide.

Spelling Bee is compatible with the Apple Family Sharing programme allowing up to six family members to use the app.

Is Spelling Bee Games & Tests app safe to use?

Parents can send the results of in-app tests to contacts via external apps, social media, or email. A parental lock protects this function.

This lock asks parents to input the answer to a simple multiplication. In itself, the lock might be too weak to sufficiently prevent many kids who use this app from getting past it, but it is further weakened by always using the same question rather than randomly generating it.

Parents will need to decide whether this lock, concerning the functionality it protects, is acceptable to them.

Overall rating of the app.

As you’ll have seen in this review of Spelling Bee, it is an excellent app with great practice features and an innovative approach to organising spelling lists sent home by teachers. It might not be the flashiest of apps, but it is more than up to getting the job done, and kids could certainly develop their spelling skills and learn their times table using only this app.

Spelling Bee is a highly recommended five-star app!

Educational App Store Spelling App Review

Congratulations Spelling Bee Games and Tests you received 5 Stars!