TOS Review Go Go Kabongo

I love it when you find a website that has games, fun, and learning! It makes my life as a mom and homeschooling teacher that much easier.  This review has brought just such a website to us.  Go Go Kabongo is a website filled with fun games, crazy characters, and learning.



Here is a little from the website:

Get children thinking—and reading—with exciting online games that they love to play! Unlike other learning games, Kabongo’s brain-boosting activities were developed by a cognitive psychologist and based in cognitive development research to help kids become more confident readers.
Kabongo games do not teach with “right” and “wrong” answers. Instead, they guide children toward better thinking by using an exciting, engaging game design. Children use a wide variety of critical-thinking and problem-solving strategies to play and progress, including these skills that are essential for reading:

 

• Attention and focus: Children must be able to focus on important clues and rule out other distracting factors in order to become efficient readers.
• Working Memory: Children must be able to keep information in their short-term memories long enough to make sense of a word, sentence, or paragraph. For example, repeating ideas back to themselves can help kids remember and make sense of key messages.
• Processing: Children use different “processing” techniques to derive meaning from what they see and hear.
  • Successive processing: In order to decode words effectively, children have to remember the letter sounds in order and assemble them into a whole. The same is true with words and sentences.
  • Simultaneous processing: As readers advance, they move more quickly through words and passages, “reducing” and organizing the information to make sense of it faster. For example, they begin to recognize certain words, taking each one in as a whole instead of letter by letter. Or, they repeat back the essence of a paragraph, culling out the less important ideas and focusing on the most important concepts.
  Visualization: When children are presented with more information than they can easily remember, creating a mental picture often helps them process what is being described.
• Planning: Fluent readers take many factors into account each time they read. They use what they know about individual letters and words, their context in the passage, and their relationship to outside experiences. As children learn to read, they evaluate and apply various strategies, developing planning skills for future learning.
• Comprehension: All of the skills and strategies above support a child’s ability to derive meaning from what he or she reads. Good comprehension is essential to all kinds of learning, from language arts to science, social studies and more.

This website has been so much fun for my 6yo.  She has just loved it.  It has helped her on her eye hand coordination, reading skills, following directions, and creating characters.  She asks to get on the site daily and then I have to tell her to get off the computer!



She has this to say about Go Go Kabongo:

"I like the skate things cause you get stickers and get to decorate with them.  I like the comic maker, twister top, design a door, and there's lots of games.  It's really, really, funner than fun!"

I'm guessing that she liked it, a lot!



This website has so many options for playing that you couldn't do them all in one setting.  Ok, maybe you could but you would be sitting there for a while.  :)  There are games that require the player to follow directions in order to spell a word, navigate obstacles to spell words, or just build a skate park and practice some moves.  The cast of characters are crazy, unique, and just plain funny.

This website is geared for kids ages 4-7.  My 9 year old played around with it and it was a little young for her but she had fun playing some of the games and has asked to play some of them even still!  Check out the different things to do on this page, and then check out the FAQ's page to get answers to any questions you may have.  Also check out the system requirements to be sure your computer is compatible with the website.



That all sounds great, but how much does it cost you ask?  Great question! 

Your child can start playing GOGO KABONGO! today for free--at no charge, with full access to Laughter Lake’s brain-boosting games and activities. You can expand the learning with two additional habitats – Galaxy Gardens and Twister Top which are $4.95 each. SPECIAL OFFER: SIGN UP NOW AND YOU GET THE GALAXY GARDENS HABITAT FREE! Hurry - this offer is only available for a limited time.



We had a great time reviewing this website and I know the rest of The Crew did as well.  Head over to The Crew Blog to check them out!





**I received a subscription to Go Go Kabongo through The TOS Crew in exchange for my honest review.