Reinforcing Important Skills: A Review of Math Shed and Spelling Shed

Disclaimer: I received a FREE copy of this product through the HOMESCHOOL REVIEW CREW in exchange for my honest review. I was not required to write a positive review nor was I compensated in any other way.

Digital learning can be a great way to incorporate the practice of important skills such as math fact fluency and spelling. In our homeschool, when our kids can see learning as a game, they are even more excited about completing their daily tasks. Our family was given a one-year subscription to Spelling Shed and Math Shed to review in our homeschool. We used the program with our younger two children who are in kindergarten and second grade and used both the Spelling Shed and Math Shed platforms to practice different skills.

What is Spelling Shed? 

Spelling Shed is an online spelling platform designed by teachers with the goal of making spelling fun. While the practicing of spelling and learning new words is fun, it is also easy for adults – parents and teachers – to manage the platform. There is an entire curriculum available with the site that you can use or you can add your own spelling lists for your children. You can even assign weekly work in the Teacher Hub. 

So families (and schools) can use Spelling Shed either as a curriculum or a supplement to their own curriculum. I looked through the curriculum - which seems very thorough. There are 36 weekly spelling lists which contain one 20-30 minute lesson, resources to deliver the lesson, one spelling practice sheet, and one homework sheet. Since we already had a curriculum we were using, I put our spelling lists into Spelling Shed for our children.

Our daughter was able to select her spelling list from this page. As you can see she has
worked on some more than others as indicated by the drone and the egg. 

What is Math Shed?

Math Shed provides number skills practice ranging from number bonds, addition, and subtraction to multiplication, division, and negative numbers. Students select which skill they wish to practice and then complete as many questions as they can correctly in 60 seconds. Just like with Spelling Shed, you can assign weekly assignments in the Teacher Hub.

Once your child is logged in and selects Math Shed, they will pick from the planets below to practice their different math skills. Once they pick a planet, they can even further narrow down the skill they wish to practice.

What skill do you want to practice? 

Be even more specific – which area in multiplication? 

How Did We Use the Programs in Our Homeschool? 

We used Spelling Shed and Math Shed in two different ways in our homeschool. On some days, both children asked if they could play the games. They enjoyed working together to answer questions, played a modified version of hangman on Spelling Shed, and wanted to collect as many honeypots as they could so they could purchase clothing, backgrounds, and accessories for their avatar.

On other days, I asked each child to spend time completing at least one activity on each program. Depending on if they were eager to go do something other than homeschooling, they spent more or less time completing multiple activities.

For each of our children, I inputted their spelling lists and assigned them tasks to work with those lists. As they worked more and more with the lists, they saw that the characters transformed from larva to drone and to worker bee. Both children liked that they could go back and work on past assignments to practice those spelling lists again. 

What Do We Think? 

I really liked that both of our children enjoyed working with Math Shed and Spelling Shed. They asked to play and sometimes I had to stop them from working on the programs. Anytime that our children willingly complete homeschooling assignments, it makes life easier.

I also enjoyed playing the bonus game, Bee Keeper, with them. It was fun to see if we could identify a variety of words. I think this also helped them think outside the box and learn how to spell new and more difficult words. (The Bee Keeper game did get harder when it was pulling from their spelling lists.)

One of the bonus games from Spelling Shed.

I think that playing both Spelling Shed and Math Shed have helped both of our children increase their spelling fluency and math fact fluency. When working on his other math assignments, I see our son completing addition and subtraction questions more quickly and accurately. And I think the Spelling Shed has given our daughter encouragement with her reading and writing skills.

When children complete the spelling or math, it lists the words or problems and shows if they were correct or not.

I loved that we could include our own spelling lists into Spelling Shed using the Hub Dashboard. This made it very easy to incorporate Spelling Shed into our daily homeschooling routine. It also didn't make it seem like this was just another online program that we were using. It was connected to our children's lessons.

I appreciate that our children could use the keyboard to type their answers if they wished or they could use the mouse to click on each letter as they attempted to spell it. This gives them another online resource to help practice keyboarding skills along with their regular homeschool work. And you can turn music, sound effects, and the reading of letters on and off in Spelling Shed. (I love an online resource where you can silence the background music.)

Finally, I also like that there are different levels. Below you can see how the easy levels and hard levels are presented in Spelling Shed. In the easier levels, the words are presented before spelling with fewer letter choices.

Spelling the word we in hard level brings in some extra letter choices.

What Do Our Kids' Think? 

Our daughter's favorite part of Spelling Shed is the spelling of words. She likes counting in Math Shed. She also said she feels clever because the spelling is getting easier for her. She said it is helping her read better because she can read more books.

Our son loves that he can make his own lists in Spelling Shed. (He spends a lot of time looking around on his homeschool online resources to figure things out and find out what he can do.) He said, "I love that you can search for lists that people have made." He also likes the extreme level in Spelling Shed. He has set up his own lists where it requires him to capitalize letters (there is a button on the screen that acts as a shift key). When I asked him about Math Shed, he said, "I like the bonds to ten (number bonds)." He does see improvement in his math fact fluency after using the different parts of Math Shed. 

If you are looking for online programs to assist your children in spelling or mathematics, I recommend you taking a closer look at Spelling Shed and Math Shed. Our son said he would recommend Math Shed to someone if they were really struggling in mathematics. He also thinks Spelling Shed could help children of all ages who have difficulty with spelling. I think Spelling Shed and/or Math Shed might be good fits for your home during the summer break or your homeschool year-round if you want to practice skills. 

Do You Want to Learn More? 

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Many Homeschool Review Crew families were given the opportunity to use Math Shed and Spelling Shed in their homeschools. Please check out their reviews to see how they used them.

Reviewing Reading Kingdom: An Online Program with the Tools to Turn Kids into Successful Readers

I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew. 

Our four-year-old son has always been interested in reading, so I jumped at the chance to review Reading Kingdom—which is an online grades K-3 reading program using "Phonics-PLUS." Reading Kingdom contains a placement test as well as reading and writing lessons divided into five levels. Each level takes approximately 10-15 weeks to complete depending on the number of sessions completed each day.

As the Reading Kingdom states "to ensure success, a child should use the program at least 4 days a week," we set out to do lessons each day. With the only exception occurring over Easter Weekend, we have been able to use Reading Kingdom with only occasional one day breaks every four days or so. Our son enjoys his 'program' so much that he was disheartened when we took a day off for his sister's birthday party.

During the placement test, parents are told to offer no assistance (which is hard!) but very important to make sure that the adaptive program knows exactly what your child knows and does not know. During the initial placement test, Reading Kingdom goes over how to type capital letters and how you navigate through the program.

In the beginning, our son seemed to struggle because he was learning a new skill—using the keyboard. He had very limited experience using a mouse and almost no experience typing on a keyboard prior to starting the review of Reading Kingdom. He was very disappointed after the first lesson or two but after he learned how to type – and I adjusted the response time to give him more time before the program prompted him with the correct answer, he began to thoroughly enjoy working each day. We have also taken advantage of the "Getting to Know the Mouse and Keyboard" training exercises on several occasions.

There are many different ways in which children are taught reading and writing using Reading Kingdom. For example, in Reading and Writing Level One, children are taught new words through Pick the Picture, Detect and Select, and the reading of books. Reading Kingdom provides Sample Lessons which further explain how children are taught in levels 1 through 5.

Reading Kingdom provides four simple questions to see if your child is ready to use their program:

1. "Can your student regularly sit and carry out school-like activities for 15 minutes at a time?" 
2. "Does your student consistently speak in sentences?" 
3. "Can your student match shapes?"
4. "Can your student hold crayons or magic markers to create drawings?" 

For more detailed information you can download "How is the Reading Kingdom different from other reading programs?" which provides a thorough explanation of how Reading Kingdom works and why it is better than other programs available. This PDF is available on the page "Why it works" and it goes through the six skills that your child will work on while using Reading Kingdom.

Since reading requires six skills, Reading Kingdom focuses upon all six using Dr. Marion Blank's "Phonics-PLUS" system. The six skills that Reading Kingdom focuses upon are:

1. Sequencing (letter order)
2. Writing
3. Sounds (the program uses activities like 'bit blends' and 'orthographic phonemics' to teach phonology) 
4. Meaning (semantics; learning the correct meaning of the word from context)
5. Grammar (syntax) 
6. Comprehension (text)

These 6 skills will help your child learn to read more easily. Reading Kingdom does not just focus on memorizing words but teaches words that can be used in "meaningful sentences" by your child. Children are taught spelling, pronunciation, meaning, and context before they are presented with a book. At the end of each of our son's lessons, there is a book that uses all the words that they have worked on the previous several days.

How We Use Reading Kingdom

Each day, our four-year-old completes at least one day's lesson of Reading Kingdom online. We start on the screen that lists our son's progress. As you can see from the screen capture, it states how many days per week your child has been using Reading Kingdom, as well as the link to change how your child interacts with the program and the response time.

From this screen, you can also click on the individual parts of the level for a further breakdown to see how your child has progressed and the performance as rated by Reading Kingdom.

One of the activities—Find and Fill—is choosing the correct word that can become the focus word (or "word of the day" as my son calls it). In this instance, our son needed to choose the word that could become 'swim.' He then is asked to type in the correct missing letters.

Another activity—Detect and Select—that our son completes within the Reading Kingdom program requires him to choose the word as it appears in text. In this photograph, the word he had to choose was 'not.' 

There are also parts of the daily lesson—Pick the Picture—that require our son to correctly select a picture of the focus word and then type it. In this case, the word was "plane." If your child gets stuck on a letter, the program offers prompting to aid them in their spelling.

There is also a student report feature which I haven't really used a lot as I feel like all the information is available to me on the dashboard screen. It is something that can be emailed so if you are having them complete the work elsewhere (e.g., at a grandparent's house), you can have the information reported to you without having to log into Reading Kingdom at home.

I shared a short video of our son using Reading Kingdom on A Mom's Quest to Teach's Instagram. 

Great Features / What We Like

• Ability to adjust the response time necessary 
• The additional keyboard and mouse training 
• The variety of ways that the vocabulary is introduced and taught 
• Each day's lessons are brief—which is perfect for our four-year-old's attention 
• The Passport book that gets new features every 20,000 points (Our son just loves seeing what will happen each day and eagerly calls over everyone in the house as he opens it.) 
• It is adaptive—one of the words Reading Kingdom asked our son to spell was 'toys'—since he spelled it correctly on the first slide, the lesson skipped through several slides for the word 'toys.'
• The words being taught are ones that help build real sentences (Our son has even taken to typing his own sentences on my laptop using the words he has learned.) 
• If necessary, your child can redo a lesson or skip a lesson or level 
• Has a unique way for helping children type capital letters—they can tap the shift key prior to the letter rather than holding shift and the letter key (there were a few occasions when there were some problems with the program recognizing the capital letter) 
• Bright colorful images
• Cute animation 
• Clear speaking voice instructing our son what to do 
• Opportunity to pause during the lesson (for 12 minutes)

Few Problems We Had Using the Program 

• Did not always recognize the use of shift and letter keys to capitalize a letter 
• There were times when we needed to reload or refresh the page 
• Sometimes the voice instructions would start prior to the lesson actually starting—refreshing the page fixed this problem 

Final Thoughts 

I highly recommend taking a look at the Reading Kingdom website to learn more information. There is even a 30-day free trial if you want to try the online program for yourself!

We have only used the program on my laptop but Reading Kingdom states it works on any device with an Internet connection—including Windows, Mac, iPad, Android, and Chromebooks. 

We have been very happy with Reading Kingdom and will continue to use it in our home to help our son grow in his reading, writing, and spelling. 

Other Options 

In addition to Reading Kingdom, there is also another program that may be of interest to you: ASD Reading. ASD Reading is a reading program designed for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) ages 4-10 who may or may not already be reading. They offer a 30-day free trial if you want to try it for your child.

To Learn More 

To learn more about the Reading Kingdom, please visit the following sites:

Website – Facebook – Twitter – Instagram

To read more reviews of the Reading Kingdom and ASD Reading, please visit the Homeschool Review Crew!