Reading Kingdom: Spelling Ninja Review !

Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew.

We were sent a 1 year subscription to Reading Kingdom Spelling Ninja for us to review as a supplement for some interactive spelling fun!

Spelling Ninja is an online spelling program that encourages students to use their phonics skills to help them decode words to spell. The program is for children ages 5-10 years and the program does have a prerequisite that students need to have completed Level 2 in Reading Kingdom or be able to read. There is a parent dashboard so you can make changes to your students settings. From the parent dashboard you can also print diplomas, progress reports and track your students progress.

How Spelling Ninja Works

Spelling Ninja gives students a sentence and picture for them to copy. The system reads the sentence to your student and then the students have to copy it. The sentence or parts of the sentence is still visible to the student as they type. Students have to make sure they are adding capital letters where needed and spaces between words and correct punctuation. The words, spaces and punctuation are colored coded as a helpful alert to the student that they are missing a letter or space as they type. The pictures matching the sentences feature diverse graphics, the screen isn’t very busy so it is not distracting to those students who are easily distracted. Before students start playing they can choose between and on screen or off screen keyboard.

Now my son wasn’t not really eager about Spelling Ninja because he didn’t like the timed response time and how it would ding him. He became quite discourage by this and didn’t want to continue the program. I was able to slow that timer down, but personally I wish it could have been turned off. Spelling Ninja also requires that your student has some knowledge of keyboard typing. I found this a little odd especially for a program targeted at students as young as 5yrs. Without a student having some basic knowledge of typing your student will be discourage.

The overall concept of using decoding and phonics is a great way strengthening spelling skills. We will use this program as a way to supplement spelling and give him some typing practice. The cost of Reading Kingdom Spelling Ninja at the time of this review is $19.99 for a years access. Be sure to check out the other crew’s of Reading Kingdom programs by clicking the banner below.