On the Ball Spelling Skills

On The Ball Spelling Skills contains four exciting activities designed to help students practice and learn spelling in the motivating context of a soccer game. Children can create their own word lists and then choose to play either against a classmate or the computer. A timer is displayed on the screen and students must see how quickly they can enter the correct spellings. The quicker they are, the more likely they are to score a goal.

• Four exciting games to help children learn their individual spelling lists
• Motivating football context
• Saves individual word lists
• Opportunity to play against a classmate or the computer

Review:
The setting is a football stadium. To start, a player has to pick a kit, enter a team name and choose an opponent. The game doesn't set the word list for you; words need to be entered manually, so that the game can be tailored to the ability of the child. The child can play against another player or against the computer. The aim in each game is to enter a correctly spelt word to give your player a chance of kicking the ball into the goal. There are 3 levels of difficulty to choose from.

Grandstand-style music accompanies the commentator, a cartoon man who sits in the top right-hand corner of the screen. Words in each game need to be entered before the referee's stopwatch finishes. The stopwatch is divided into three colour zones. The first half is green: enter a correct word while the timer is in this zone, and your player is guaranteed to score a goal. If it creeps into the yellow or red zones, however, your player may miss, but it did inspire them to enter words more quickly as the game progressed.

Testers felt more encouraged to stick with a task when there was a chance of putting the ball in the net. We had no trouble getting them to finish the entire CD-ROM.
adapted from experteviews.co.uk