My wife and I believe in a strict summer regimen when it comes to academics. This began 2 years ago when my daughter was recommended to be held back to repeat the first grade.
Not believing this was the best course of action we bought math and grammar workbooks to prepare her for 2nd grade, committing her to 8 pages a day.
It was extreme, but when she entered the 2nd grade, she was above par. This summer, we’re still instituting workbooks, but we’ve also made it more fun by incorporating a brand new video game called thinkSMART for Nintendo DS that is geared specifically to children her age.
Getting Into thinkSMART
Like any educational game, such as My Virtual Tutor, parents should play it with their children first. I didn’t and here was the response from my 9-year-old.
“Dad, the game is awesome, but it said I was wrong when I was right.”
I checked it out. She didn’t read the directions.
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thinkSMART has a Mode for Training and Career
There are many aspects to the thinkSMART video game. First, it caters to boys and girls in that the coaches who encourage and guide them can be either gender.
Beyond this, and more importantly, it touches on such educational avenues as:
- Language
- Memory
- Comprehension
- Mathematics
- Spatial Awareness
- Logic
During the training portion, my daughter had the opportunity to get accustomed to the different programs, which is helpful not only academically, but as a means to adjust to the software.
Once we felt ready to get into the career we went there, scoring well enough to earn a Bronze Medal (I think there are only three, so maybe we weren’t so hot).
Then we trained again, but could not progress to the next part of our career, which was not a glitch, but an advantage of using thinkSMART.
The Best Part About thinkSMART
The best part about this game is that children can only progress their career one day at a time. This means that after they complete the more elementary tasks they have to wait a day (the system knows how long a day is; I tried turning it off and on again) to do harder exercises.
This is just like our summer regimen with the workbooks. Right now my daughter is doing moderately difficult addition and subtraction, identifying common and proper nouns, and getting some good time in the pool.
Come July, she’ll be doing long division, multiplication, a book report, and getting into the finer aspects of spatial awareness and logic via thinkSMART, setting her up to be above and beyond her peers this coming school year.
In addition to this, thinkSMART is only $30, making it a very practical choice when compared to other educational, less interactive, tools.
