Read - Kids Learn to Read and Write in 20 Easy Lessons
© 2016 Olivier Romanetti
Every once-in-a-while an app comes along to remind you how far we've come from the days of mega-corporations who sell curriculum by way of books. This $3 app contains a set of 20 basic, cut-and-dry, English phonics instructions, presented using mastery learning techniques with clear rewards. The content comes from free, open-source sources. All the narration and phonics work is artificial - by way of your tablet's built in speech synthesizer. We liked the non-watered down look of the interface, however. This app feels like a serious app - with no kidification - and it is easy to get started. From a teaching and curriculum point of view, there is evidence of some hasty work and easy to measure pedagogy, all built around 100 site words. The speech synthesis could be better, and you can't control the rate of the presentation. So if you already know some of your letters, things can be very boring. The letter "a" is displayed using a font that is not used in most early learning curriculum, which some teachers won't like, and the entire experience is dry. But this app delivers as promised - despite some rough edges, it's way better than a curriculum like Writing to Read. There are two accents (American, British) with 20 lessons, 120 exercises and 150 interactive stories with step-by-step progression. The app is designed for the first time users.
$2.99
Teaches: phonics, letters, reading, language
CTR Rating: 82.5%