6 Ways to use your Nintendo DS to improve reading
By Ed Taekema in Reading on September 30th, 2008
My kids remain fascinated by their Nintendo DS and at home we have begun looking for ways to turn this into time well spent. Our focus has been on our first grader who is just starting his lifetime of reading, but we’ve found things for our sixth grader too. Here are some ideas to use those that gaming time to the kids advantage:
- Big Brain Academy DS
This is a great mind minding game that exercises all kinds of important learning facilities. Most of the activities are appropriate for a first grader.
- My Word Coach DS
This one is a little advanced for the first grader, but great for our sixth grader. Designed by linguists, the learning approach is excellent. It has a progressive set of games that are unlocked as the player scores higher.
- Spelling Challenges and More DS
This is another spelling game for the DS in the style of a pokemon adventure. Younger kids may have trouble with the qwerty keyboard, but otherwise good for all ages. It will ask you for your age and set the level of the game based on that. Great for kids.
- Margot’s Word Brain DS
This is another word based DS game. It has a series of games that test spelling, word use, and comprehension. This is likely more appropriate for our older child. Maybe even the adults …
- Games that involve reading like Pokemon Diamond
or Pokemon Pearl
. Other than the unpronounceable character names, there is a lot of reading involved in the games and it pulls the player into reading quite naturally.
- Use the touchscreen for spelling and writing review. We do this with my son. He doesn’t like writing his spelling words out on paper, but is happy to practice them on the DS. We let him use the picto chant feature and the stylus to write out the words (not the keyboard).
If you think this is a little crazy, there is some research out there that says that the DS is a good learning platform, especially for vocabulary and spelling. I’m always on the lookout for new DS title and techniques that help the kids. Please let me know if you have any other thoughts or title suggestions by posting a comment.
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11/30/2008 at 11:39 pm
Have you come across any DS word games to help children learn specific sets of words? I’m looking for something that I could enter my child’s weekly spelling lists from school.
12/01/2008 at 5:56 pm
@Ed3 -
I haven’t found one that was that flexible yet. I’ll post it here if I do.