iPad App Review: Word Wall HD

Word Wall is an app that teaches kids about the alphabets, reading and spelling using various types of games. It is based on phonetics to teach reading and that is good as my son Josiah is just learning that right now and it seemed to be increasing his vocabulary.

From the description on the iTunes page:

Take a look at how your child can learn with Word Wall:

See – young readers view letters and words along with a reference picture and visual cues. This reinforcement strengthens the association between the picture and the word helping them to remember and recall each word.

Hear – each letter and word is phonetically sounded out and repeated reinforcing letter-sound associations.

Say – young readers are prompted to say the words and repeat the words heard
repetitively, thereby helping to strengthen comprehension and memory skills.

Write – young readers generate narrative and writing skills that encourages visual and word connection.

The first video shows Josiah playing with the jigsaw words that makes a simple word. The second part of the video utilizes a memory game, but using one word and one picture. You gotta see it to know what I mean. Josiah loves puzzles, but I wish the puzzle here is a little more realistic in the touch. The puzzle tend to snap into place before it is properly dragged into place. The see and find game is fine but Josiah loses his interest as he actually can’t read yet, so it’s more of a coincidental matching of the word with the picture, but still I believe he learns the word from there, after seeing the picture.

The second video shows most of the other ‘games’ within the app. First is the ‘writing’ game. As you can see here it is not exactly writing, but it is more drag and drop the letters to form words. What I like is that every letter is sounded out (the phonetic sound) and the voice over is very clear at reading the word in the end in a happy and cheerful voice. Josiah will follow along and he doesn’t usually follow along to a lot of things. There are so many new words here to be created so it’s kind of an endless well of knowledge for my little one. Just for ‘am’ alone there are 4 different words he can make, and after a word is made, a sentence will appear and is read out loud to show how this word is used in a sentence. I think this is brilliant so they won’t use a word a wrong way.

The second game in the video is the Hide a Word Game where everything is in the dark and Josiah moves his finger around like using a torch to find hidden words. When the words are found, the picture for it appears too and it is read out loud. It’s a nice touch, he can spend a long time playing this.

The next game is the Bubble words game, where alphabets are inside bubbles and floating around. There is a picture and empty spaces below. Josiah needs to drag the bubble alphabets to the empty slots to make the words. No hints are given so for my non-speller I need to spell for him one by one. He recognizes every alphabet but not words yet. For older kids it should be easy and fun.

This app is actually most suited for 5-6 year olds so I think this app will be used for many years more. And guess what? It is on SALE from now till 20th August, so get it now for only USD0.99 NP USD1.99. Pretty worth it to have so many words and so many games within one app don’t you think?

Disclaimer: I was not paid for this review. However, I did receive a copy of Word Wall HD for my iPad review. The opinions in this blog post are 100% mine.