Tiggly Words is an engaging tool for teaching young children literacy, storytelling, vocabulary, and spelling. Today I am reviewing this interactive learning tool. Disclosure: I received a review copy of this educational tool to review.
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What is Tiggly, Anyway?
What You'll Find on This Page
Tiggly sets come with BPA free, dishwasher safe educational manipulatives that pair with an app. The manipulatives interact physically with the screen, rather than connecting over Wi-Fi or via Bluetooth. Most of the apps are available for both iPad and Android devices. I have noticed that the newest apps tend to come out on iPad first, and you have to wait a while to get them on Android. The ranges of apps that pair with these manipulatives help the toy to grow with your child.
Learning Literacy with Tiggly Words
At four years old, Anna knows her letters and can write her name and those of her siblings and a few friends. She doesn’t read, but is curious. This makes Tiggly Words a fun product for her to interact with. 7-year-old Lily and 8-year-old Johnny also find the app interesting, although primarily on the level of helping Anna rather than playing themselves.
Tiggly Words comes with codes to download 4 apps. These apps can be played with or without Tiggly letters.
Story Maker
This is the app that Anna is most interested in right now. Focusing on CVC words, you place a tiggly letter in the middle of the pattern and watch to see if it creates a word. If the selected vowel makes a word, an animation of that word appears on the screen. If it doesn’t, the letter springs off the screen.
Alphabet Kitchen
In alphabet kitchen, alphabet letters are cut out of cookie dough and then mixed together to make words. Once the word is made, a new cookie appears representing the word. This app feels a bit slow-paced to Anna, possibly because it relies on Cookie Monster’s charm and my kids never caught the Sesamy Street bug.
Doctor
In Doctor, kids spell words to help the doctor treat patients. The words in this app are a bit advanced for Anna, and it doesn’t seem to interest my older children – possibly because there is so much filler (slow-paced). I could see Anna enjoying it once she starts learning sight words.
Submarine
Explore words under the sea by finding different underwater doors in Submarine. Anna enjoys this app, even though some of the words are kind of out there, like “elver” and “inconnu”. All of my kids find this app entertaining, becasue the characters that represent the starting vowel sounds tend to be funny. They also enjoy guessing who will come out of the door next.
I took a quick video so that you can see both Tiggly Words and Tiggly Math in action.
As you can tell, My third grader and second grader also find this interactive toy pretty engaging. At 7 and 8 years old, I don’t feel like there is much the apps for this product can teach them. Maybe some spelling for my 7-year-old and a little vocabulary for my 8-year-old. Still, it says a lot about the apps that the production value is high enough to keep them engaged even when they know most of the content that is being taught.
Would your kids enjoy the Tiggly Words app? What are your favorite ways to teach literacy? Leave a comment below, or drop a note on my Facebook page!
More Literacy Activities for Kids:
Here are a few more literacy activities your kids might enjoy:
- A Fun Way to Learn Letters and Spelling
- Encouraging Literacy with the Amazon Kindle
- Read-Aloud Books Your Kids Will Love
- Coded Messages Literacy Fun for Kids
- Learning About Opposites: Book and Activity
- Teaching Kids Storytelling
I received this product to review. All opinions are my own.
Do you own any Tiggly products? What do you think of them?
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MaryAnne is a craft loving educator, musician, photographer, and writer who lives in Silicon Valley with her husband Mike and their four children.
Sounds like a great app for young uns!
I like the idea of manipulatives with a literacy app!
There really are some pretty cool apps for learning to read. I like the interactive nature of this.
I like old-fashioned reading paper books and reading aloud. But we do really need to work on spelling…
Emma and Johnny remember how to spell virtually every word they see – and I was the same way as a kid. Lily seems to struggle a bit more, so we are just entering spelling practice territory.
In general, I agree with you that reading paper books and reading aloud is ideal (although I am partial to the kindle e-readers – the ones that are ONLY e-readers). That being said, I think a program like this can make an enormous difference for a child who is struggling by making practice fun.