It’s always nice to have some fun games to use in your homeschool to help your kids practice key skills. A couple of my kids have really been enjoying practicing their math and spelling with Math Shed and Spelling Shed from EdShed.
What Is This Product?
An online subscription, EdShed has several different games for spelling and math practice. I received a one-year subscription, and up to five kids could use it. There was also a parent dashboard that allowed me to keep track of what they were learning while they had fun.
When you log in, your student can select between Math and Spelling. The dashboard is pretty intuitive, which made it simple for my kids to use independently.
In the teacher’s hub, you find tools to help you track progress, and resources to help your kids get the most out of the program.
Spelling Shed
I had my eight year old use Spelling Shed to practice her spelling during the review period. You can go in as the parent and set spelling lists for them to use. I just went with the default ones to give her a good variety to try it out.
Once you open the Spelling game, you can select between different levels.
I had my daughter start with Stage 1 & 2.
Then you could pick between the regular game and the bonus one. She really liked one of the Bonus games called Missing Word. Here, you had to select the word that was spelled correctly to fill in the blank in the sentence. I liked that this really helped her practice her reading and her spelling. Bonus for sure!
You get lots of points after each correct answer, and the games are short (about ten words each). We’ve tried some different educational games that seemed to go on forever, so this was greatly appreciated. For each game, it shows the status so you can tell at a glance how many you have left.
Before spelling the word, the students get to see the word and definition. This can really help with vocabulary.
My daughter thought it was fun to play Spelling Shed, and she says she wants to keep playing it in the future.
Math Shed
I had my ten-year-old daughter use Math Shed to practice her times tables. There are also other levels you can use, but that was the one we focused on. Here’s what the dashboard looks like for the math portion of EdShed.
Once you select “Times Tables” you can customize the facts that are covered.
Since my daughter already knows most of the facts and is just working on getting quicker to master them, I typically had her select the 2-12s option, with just multiplication. When she wanted an easy game to play, she picked the 2s, 5s & 10s since she already has those down.
Once the game begins, the goal is to get as many correct answers as possible in a minute.
She simply had to click on the one with the correct answer. This was a fun way for her to practice, and since it only lasted a minute, she didn’t mind at all. She said, “It’s still math and I don’t really like math, and multiplication is hard, but if I have to do it, I like doing this game.”
You can select between easy, medium, and hard levels, which makes it nice to customize. My daughter typically picked Easy, though I made her do Medium a couple of times. This added a second row of answers, so it wasn’t as easy to simply guess the correct answer.
What We Thought Of This Product
The kids that I had use the games thought they were fun to play. They didn’t complain about using the program.
We had some days where it wouldn’t load, but with our metered internet, I’m confident that was a problem on our end not a problem with the site.
I know I didn’t use these games to their full potential. You can create accounts for students and let them use their Honey Pot points to upgrade their avatar and all sorts of fun things. So there is definitely more to explore here in the future.
If you’re looking for a fun way to have your children practice their math and spelling over the summer (or anytime really), I definitely recommend EdShed.
I was one of 81 reviewers to try out Math Shed and Spelling Shed over the past few weeks. To see what other families thought, please click on the banner below.
