Big IQ Kids is an e learning website for children grades K-8th grade. Their goal is to create an appreciation for hard work and study habits. They offer both free and premium programs in the areas of spelling efficiency, vocabulary building, math fact mastery, and US geography. Each lesson takes 15-20 minutes and best results are achieved when students use the program every day. The website is designed so the child can use it idependently with little help from parents or teachers. The child can work at his/her own pace and is only moved on when they have "mastered" the area they are working on. Each one of the programs can be used with the pre loaded curriculum or you can customize them by putting in your own spelling words, math facts, vocabulary words or state facts. After completion of their daily lesson, the child earns a game coin which can be spent on any of the strategy or educational games in the Big IQ Kids arcade. Parents and teachers are kept informed of the students progress through email progress reports.
The Spelling Program makes learning the spelling words easy and fun. The children get to practice their words with interactive avatars during quizzes, spelling bees, and fun spelling games customized to the child's ability. They finish off the week with a Spelling Test.
The Math Program is designed to attain mastery of fundamental math skills. The program monitors your child's progress and advances them when they have achieved proficiency. Each lesson can be tailored to fit the child's needs.
The US Geography program is designed to help children master important facts about all 50 states. Through intereactive lessons and quizzes your child will learn locations, capital cities, spelling, and abbreviations of the states. They also learn each state's nickname, landmarks, economy, and fun facts.
The Vocabulary program helps to improve your child's attitude toward vocabulary work while increasing standardized test scores. The word lists contains words from elementaru through SAT prep. Interactive lessons make lerning vocabulary fun!
What is the difference between the free and premium programs? Premium members have their progress tracked, saved, problem areas identified and reprted through email progress reports. Premium members progress is tracked therefore they are only advanced when mastery of the area is completed. Also, premium members have access to all of the games on the game page while free members have limited access. To read more about these differences click here.
Pricing for the Premium Bundle Package including all 4 programs (Math, Spelling, Vocabulary, US Geography) after a free 7 day trial is $19.99 for 1 month (individual), $99.99 for 12 months (individual), or $299.99 for 12 months (classroom.) Or, you can purchase each program individually. Click here to see all the different pricing options.
Nick (9) and Alex (7) have had a lot of fun using this website. Alex has been mostly working on Spelling and Nick has tried out all of the programs. They actually like it so much they even request to play it on the week-ends and I have to set a time limit every day so they know when they have to stop. Nick has been known to complete an entire weeks worth of lessons in one day and mastered the entire US Geography program in just a couple of weeks. Their favorite part of course is getting to play the games when they complete their lessons.
There are many things I like about the program. The boys can log in, do their lessons, and play their games independently without any help from me. The lessons themselves are only about 15 minutes long and the reward games only last about 3-5 minutes (unless your child is really, really good at them then they will be longer.) I personally like to use the pre loaded curriculum but having a choice to customize with your own curriculum is a great feature. You also have the option to raise or lower the amount of questions your child has to complete during their lesson. The Math section was set up for the child to do 50 problems before the lesson was over, but I changed it to 25 when Nick said, "It just isn't worth 1 game coin to have to do all of those problems." You even have the ability to customize when your child gets to use their game coins. They really are learning and remembering the information presented to them even though their favorite part of using the site is getting to play the games.
There are a few things about Big IQ Kids that I think could be improved. With the premium membership, there are no advertisements on the page that the children do their lessons on, but when they go to the game page there are advertisements located at the top of the page that the children could click on. Also, the computer voice that is speaking to you (Jake) can at times be very distorted. Many times the boys had no idea what word he was saying (during the Spelling lesson) but we able to figure it out by the sentence that was given. Many of the 1st grade words we have had so far are rhyming words and it is very hard to understand what word is being said.
To see what other crew members are saying click here.
I received a complimentary Premium membership to Big IQ Kids for the purpose of writing a fair and honest review. I received no other compensation.
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