Grammar Wonderland (Elementary)
Grammar Wonderland (Elementary) gallery
What parents need to know
Parents need to know that Grammar Wonderland (Elementary) is an educational game created by school textbook publishing company McGraw-Hill. Through three arcade-style games, kids practice grammar concepts related to subjects, verbs, and adjectives. Multiple users can have accounts on one device, and kids can customize their challenge level -- easy, medium, hard, or expert. Kids can focus on particular concepts or just play through and tackle skills at random. The app doesn't provide definitions for or instruction around the parts of speech.What kids can learn
Three different arcade-style games are a fun way to test kids on grammar concepts, but kids may tire of the same three games for every concept.
Customizable practice section lets kids work on nouns, verbs, or adjectives at an easy, medium, hard, or expert level. Kids can even focus on a specific concept, like proper nouns or demonstrative adjectives and pronouns. Grammar elements are unrelated to game content, however, and is for practice only.
Multiple students can have accounts on a device, tracking their progression through the map of skills. No reports for parents, though.
What's it about?
After setting up an account with a first name and last initial, kids choose to practice specific skills or explore worlds. Both options feature the same games -- navigating an airplane to touch the correct clouds while avoiding obstacles and wrong answers; feeding an astronaut polar bear the right food packets; or tossing the right water buckets at a camel. Kids choose between easy, medium, hard, or expert levels, and work on nouns, verbs, or adjectives. each game handles incorrect answers differently -- the camel game offers only two options, so the correct answer is obvious; the airplane game penalizes incorrect answers by slowing the plane down a bit; and in the bear-feeding game, the bear gets a sick, sad look when fed the wrong answer.
Is it any good?
GRAMMAR WONDERLAND (ELEMENTARY) packs quite a bit of grammar content into its games, though it is all for practice and not instruction. Kids do have to focus on several unrelated skills -- reading the question and using game controls -- to play successfully. The games move pretty quickly, so all of that can be distracting for kids, making the game frustrating. Since the grammar elements aren't really related to the game content, kids may tire of the app before playing through the whole thing.
Families can talk about...
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Families can talk about subjects, verbs, and adjectives before kids play, if they don't already have some prior knowledge.
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To improve writing and grammar skills, read widely -- read aloud to kids of all ages and encourage kids to read independently.
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Ask kids to use particular parts of speech: What adjectives would describe this flower? What verb applies to what you're doing now?
App details
| Devices: | iPad, Android |
| Price: | $2.99 |
| Pricing structure: | Paid |
| Release date: | November 29, 2012 |
| Category: | Educational Games |
| Topics: | Adventures, Space and aliens |
| Size: | 73.70 MB |
| Publisher: | McGraw Hill Education |
| Version: | 1.0 |
| Minimum software requirements: | Requires iOS 4.2 or later. |
