Review ~ Zoo Whiz

My kids love these fun online learning games that are set in a zoo environment. They learn about animals and earn coins to play games while practicing math and reading.

Disclosure: I received a free copy of this product for review, all opinions are 100% my own.

I love it when online games and activities come up for review through the Schoolhouse Review Crew! I was so excited to have the opportunity to try out Zoo Whiz premium.

I knew right away that the theme of this program would be a hit with our kids. They love anything nature related!

Zoo Whiz is an online gaming site where children play educational activities to earn coins and build their zoos. The activities cover math, reading, and English in an interactive and fun way.

Zoo Whiz has both a free version and a premium version. Most of the games and activities are available in the free version, but the premium offers better record keeping and lets you better adjust the skill levels for each child.

When a child first logs in they are taken to the zoo yard. By clicking on the different buildings the child can explore the activities available to them.

The Arcade is where they can play games, Milestones shows them their progress in different skill areas, The Biodome is where they can buy animals and build their zoo, the Learn & Earn is where they complete educational activities to earn coins.

Learn & Earn: In this section, children are given questions to answer and when they get the correct answer they earn coins.

The questions are grouped into math, reading, and words. After that they are grouped by age and grade, I was easily able to adjust the settings to get the right fit for each child. The questions are mixed and our kids loved that!  They never knew what type of question would pop up next.

ZooWhiz correlates closely with your child’s curriculumThe educational content correlates closely with the relevant curricula for all Australian states, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, key USA states, key Canadian provinces and SingaporeZooWhiz allows you to select educational content appropriate to local spelling conventions and units of measure including Australian/British or American spellings, Imperial or Metric units of measure or currencies in $, £ or €.ZooWhiz is suitable for use in English-speaking countries and other countries where education in English is required ~ from ZooWhiz.com

The Milestones:   This area of the site is where you can check your child's progress. To make changes you can adjust your child's levels from their account or from your parent account.

I find myself using the kids account for this, simply because they are already logged in. I haven't been using the parent's account area much because many of the features are still being developed.

It does look like it will be great though! They use a system called age floors, using this you can set the lowest age-level activities and highest age-level activities your child will be able to play.

The Arcade: In the arcade are there are fun games the kids can play. When they first join the site they are given 5000 free coins to start exploring with. Mine spent them all in the Biodome first! But they have also enjoyed playing the arcade games.

They are "charged" 500 coins for about 3 minutes of game time. I do like that it saves their place in the game, so they can pick up from their last point.

The Biodome: This is one of my children's favorite parts of the site.  In this section, you can buy animals to add to your zoo. The animals are grouped by category, the rarer an animal the more expensive it is.

Included are animals you would expect like rabbits and bears, but if your tastes are more exotic why not add some dinosaurs or a yeti to your zoo for fun!  Each animal is well documented with information about its habitat and needs.

The exotic animals are only available to premium members and the information about each is given in more detail.  Including their Latin names, genus, diet, threats, etc.

We have been using Zoo Whiz as a fun in between lesson game, and to review concepts we have been working on.  Our kids love it and are happy to play it as often as they can.  I don't mind that because it really IS an educational game in so many ways.

The only suggestion I would have for improving Zoo Whiz, is I wish that the activities had an audio option. This would be especially helpful for the PreK to grade 2 levels. My younger children are more than capable of doing the activities in this program, but the directions are not written on a lower reading level. Because of this, I have to be available to read every question to them or have an older child help.

Overall we have really enjoyed using Zoo Whiz and I would recommend it to anyone looking for educational games for their children.