Based on Common Core State Standards, Word Wagon teaches letters, phonics, and spelling. With over 100 words and 4 levels of learning, kids cover letter names, letter sounds, and spelling of 4-6 letter words. Kids collect fun animated stickers for each word learned, which can be kept in a virtual sticker book. There are also interactive surprises for kids to discover, such as playing hide and seek or drawing pictures with the characters. Word Wagon has won the Parent’s Gold Choice Award and the Kids’s Technology Review Editor’s Choice Award.

Website: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id436716368

What Users Love About the App

“Great for spelling practice. I use this app for my ESL students who are working on spelling and phonics practice. I love the different options of words and that the kids can switch between the lower and upper case.”

“LOVE this app! My 2 year old daughter loves this app…and I love it because it’s teaching her letter recognition, etc. There are similar drag and drop spelling programs out there, but none have the fun of this one..as soon as we downloaded it she completely ignored all of the other ones we had installed!”

“his game has four levels. My 2-year-old can easily do levels 1 & 2 (dragging scrambled letters to thier matching counterpart and making a word). My 4-year-old, who’s learning to read now, enjoys level 3 which only gives you the letters but no other hints on how to spell the word. I’m glad there’s another level after this to keep challenging her.”

“Best Educational Apps for toddlers and pre-k!! We are so glad we found the duck duck moose Apps!! We recommed ALL of them- they are incredibly well done, educational, interactive, user friendly, and fun. We’ve done extensive research on educational apps for our kids and these are really top notch.”

“Love It!!! This app is great! Aesthetically its a 10. Well designed and easy to use. App works great for kiddos with speech delays as it not only teaches them how to spell words but it breaks them down sounds by sound. I highly recommend this app for anyone with children Pre-K – 1st or 2nd grade.”

What Users Dislike About the App

“We want to recommend it to others in our community but it needs to have one additional feature before we can really spread the word. Please consider a setting that would allow us to turn off the requirement to “build a word” in letter order.”

“It has inherent problems that are restricting and distracting to kids. Drag is unforgiving for kids. The kids are expected to drag it all the way. Word assembly requires kids to gather letters in orderly fashion. For example, N-U-T must be placed in the same order left to right. Why not allow kids to build however order they like?”

“Lack of excitement. Downloaded and tried it out myself before letting my kids use it. It is lacking some excitement. I think my kids will stop using it after 15 minutes, but will see.”

“I think the app lacks variety. While the focus might change, the activity is the same across all levels- pulling letters into squares to form the word. In the easy levels the words letters are displayed, in the harder the child has to guess on their own. Another drawback is that the word does not need to be built from left to right.”