This blog is my attempt to document our busy but BLESSED lives raising and educating our children for His glory. A child of God, wife to one, and mom to 6 fabulous kids. We are in our 15th year of homeschooling using a Classical ~ Literature based approach.

Come along for the good, the bad & the ugly.



Friday, March 25, 2011

TOS Review ~ Big IQ Kids

BigIQKids

Have you heard of Big IQ kids? No, well neither had I until I was given the opportunity to try out their learning program from TOS review crew. Big IQ kids is geared towards students in grades K-8 and is an online learning programs that covers a wide range of learning topics, including spelling, vocabulary, math, and U.S. geography.

From the Big IQ website:
"BigIQkids.com provides true, self-learning applications without the need for parental oversight. All our material and instructions (each word and sentence) are delivered to the young learner by interactive characters with phonetically correct lips so even children with limited reading skills can utilize our e-learning applications."

What I loved about Big IQ Kids is that it is a learning program with interactive tools that  work together to help create individualized lessons around a student's own pace. Their advanced 'engines' allow children to comfortably work through each lesson, without pressure.  Advancement to the next lesson is not reached until mastery is held on that particular subject.

Big_IQ_Kids_Spelling_Bee[3]

The Spelling Program portion of Big IQ kids gives the  student access to a 40,000 word dictionary and 40 lessons/word lists. You as the parent also has the option of creating a custom word lists for your children based off of your own spelling word lists. After you have typed in the words you wish your student to work on, the program automatically customizes a week’s worth of lessons, quizzes, and tests! How sweet is that!

Big_IQ_Kids_Math[3]  

The Math Portion allows  students to work on mastery of fundamental math skills. The program is highly interactive and monitors the child's progress and advances the student based upon proficiency.  Students can work on whatever area they are currently working on in their regular math programs or whatever they need remedial help on. Lessons can be generated for your student according to their grade level or specific subjects.

Big_IQ_Kids_Vocab[3]

The Vocabulary program includes lists of words for 3rd grade through adult and SAT words. Custom lists can be created with this section just as  with the spelling portion of the website. You can save up to 40 custom word lists at a time.

Big_IQ_Kids_States[3]

The U.S. States program lets your children participate in interactive lessons that teach U.S. state facts.  Achieving mastery of all 50 states’ location, their capital cities, correct spelling and associated abbreviations is done through lessons and quizzes.  State’s nickname, landmarks, economy and commonly known fun facts are also learned, a great addition to any U.S. State postcard swap.

After  completing lessons students are rewarded with coins that they can use to play games.  The arcade style library has over 35 games to choose from.  The games section was my girls favorite place to hang out, and who could blame them, the games were fun!  There were many a time I had to remind them to get back to playing the “learning” games.  The “dress up” game was their favorite, however, I especially enjoyed playing the sandwich game.  

So, you are probably thinking this program costs an arm and a leg for all you get, right? Nope, it’s affordably priced !  BigIQkids offers all four programs (mentioned above) in two versions, free and premium.  Premium memberships range in price from $19.99 per month to $99.99 for 12 months for all four programs.  Subjects may also be purchased individually for as little as  $7.99 a month.  Their is a 7 day trial period, so head on over and check it out. If you only need to use one program instead of all 4, they offer pricing packages for that too.  Complete pricing information can be found here.  Find out the difference between the free and premium programs by clicking HERE

Madison and Mikayla have been using Big IQ Kids for several weeks now and give it 2 BIG thumbs up! And I second that with two thumbs up! We were given a generous offer of a one year subscription to the Premium portion of Big IQ Kids, THANK YOU!!! This subscription gives us access to all 4 programs.  The girls would jokey for position of who gets what computer to play Big IQ Kids on. They are able to log onto the program and get right through the lessons without any prompting from me.  The lessons are very independent minded, something we are working towards with my girls, and the virtual “tutor” walks the girls through each section in the program. We will definitely be using this program for the rest of the year, especially throughout the summer!

Want to know what others think? I encourage you to hop on over to the TOS crew blog, HERE, and see what my fellow TOS crew members are saying about Big IQ kids.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I am a member of The Old Schoolhouse 2010-2011 Crew and as such received a copy of Big IQ Kids program  in exchange for a thorough and honest review.  Though I am compensated with free products, I am not compensated in the form of cash for my reviews.  The opinions I have given are mine and may differ from others but are not influenced by the company or the free product provided .

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