HOMER Learn and Grow is an educational app tailored for children ages 2 to 8. The app boasts a diverse range of activities and aims to cover key developmental areas such as reading, math, social-emotional learning, creativity, and thinking skills.
In this review, let’s take a closer look at the quality of literacy instruction in the app so you can decide whether or not it’s worth using in phonics instruction.
The Learning Path in HOMER
The learning path of HOMER takes children through a series of lessons that gradually build upon their knowledge. Overall, it’s personalized and systematic but can improve its parent involvement.
Systematic Instruction
HOMER Learn & Grow takes a personalized approach to learning with an introductory quiz that helps determine each user’s starting point and their appropriate learning path. This ensures that the educational content is developmentally suitable, adapting to the unique needs of users with different ages and ability levels.
The “Learning Path” is an easy-to-follow line and indicates that the instruction in this game is systematic. Systematic instruction means that there is a carefully pre-planned sequence of skills that will be introduced and practiced. These skills will move from easier to more difficult as the game progresses.
There is also a “practice” area for players to leave the path and practice specific skills. The HOMER app explains why they have chosen this approach and clearly shares the evidence that supports it.
Transparency and Communication
While it is commendable that the app has a clear learning plan, it could be more transparent with educators and parents about the details of this learning path. Sharing a description of skills along the learning path or a “Scope and Sequence” would improve communication about specific learning goals for children.
Phonemic Awareness Activities
Phonemic awareness is the ability to work with individual speech sounds (phonemes) in language. It is a foundational skill for learning to read. HOMER has many activities and methods that help new readers improve this important skill.
Practicing Letter Sounds
The foundational skill of phonemic awareness is addressed by the HOMER Learn & Grow app, particularly in its introduction of letter sounds. The app excels in its letter sound accuracy, presenting clear and precise representations of phonemes.
Note: the letter sounds within the HOMER app are delivered (and limited) to an audience that speaks American English.
Learning Short Vowel Sounds
Knowing vowel sounds is crucial to literacy development. Every word has a vowel sound. Children cannot read any word without first knowing vowel sounds. Short vowel sounds are a common place for new readers to get stuck. The HOMER App has a great deal of practice and repetition in recognizing, producing, and hearing these sounds, which is truly valuable in learning to read.
Sound Articulation Exercises
Another admirable feature of HOMER is its inclusion of facial animations that show users how to articulate sounds. This type of modeling can be helpful for children learning to make new speech sounds or identify them in words.
While the app successfully incorporates these visual aids, it’s worth noting that the quality of the facial animation may fall short in providing detailed assistance. This feature could be improved by increasing the detail in the animation, showing a real mouth making the sound, or including a short description of what the tongue, teeth, and lips are doing to make each sound.
The game also has a feature where a child can listen to a specific sound and then record themselves repeating that sound. Then, they can listen back to how they made the sound. This is a fun and helpful way for children to be able to hear how they make a sound and how it compares to the sample sound.
However, any sound, no matter how inaccurate, can be recorded and practiced by the child. The game will give positive feedback for any articulation of a sound, even an incorrect or completely unintelligible one. Therefore, parents and educators should monitor this gameplay and consult with a speech-language pathologist (SLP) if they have concerns about speech production or articulation for their child.
Teaching Letter Formation
An important skill in early literacy is learning how to print letters. The HOMER Learn & Grow app introduces letter formation through videos that model the formation of the letter while a child’s voice narrates what they are doing to make the letter. This is referred to as a ‘verbal path’ for the formation of letters and can support a child’s memory of how to form that letter. There are also opportunities for children to trace a letter with an animated line guide.
Accuracy of Letter Formation
Unfortunately, HOMER’s model videos and tracing games do not follow common letter formations approved and used by occupational therapists and educators. This can cause children to practice letter formation in an inaccurate way or a way that won’t align with what’s taught in schools.
This is especially important for the formation of the letters <b> and <d> as they are so often confused by children. Additionally, the game accepts and rewards many formations of the letter, even inaccurate ones. Parents and educators should carefully monitor this part of the game to see that letters are made appropriately and accurately.
Reading Practices
When it comes to reading, the HOMER app offers several learning activities that follow specific types of phonics instruction.
Synthetic Phonics
The HOMER Learn & Grow app uses synthetic phonics to teach children to read and spell. Synthetic phonics uses individual letters and sounds that are blended to read words. It’s a simple, logical, and evidence-based method of teaching reading and spelling.
“Tap to Read” Decoding Exercises
The HOMER app has a “Tap and Read” game where players tap individual letters in a word to hear their sound. Then, the sounds are blended to read a word.
In the app, blending is first done slowly while visually represented by a sloth on roller skates gliding under the letters as the sounds are repeated. Then the word is blended more quickly, which is shown with a hedgehog on roller skates gliding under the letters. The player can click on the sloth and hedgehog to repeatedly hear the slow and fast blending of the sounds into a word.
This game does a great job of visually representing and modeling what phoneme blending is and how words can be ‘sounded out’. That said, this game can be quite passive for new readers since it blends the words for them. Parents or educators should encourage their children to participate and verbally blend the sounds into words along with the characters on screen.
Continuous Texts and Story Reading
The HOMER app has a “Stories” feature which includes classics like Where the Wild Things Are and other books that match the interests of each child or student. The learner in the app can choose to read these books on their own or have them read out loud. These story-reading options are a great feature of the HOMER app, supporting a child’s motivation and comprehension in early reading.
Early Readers
There are also books along the “Learning Path” in the reading section of the app. The first reader is called The Boys Like to Run. Many of the words in this book, such as “run”, are decodable. This means the child has been taught how to blend sounds together and those practice words are in the book. This helps children practice their new decoding skills in connected text.
Unfortunately, many words in the first book are irregular, referred to as “sight words” on the app. To read this first book, a child would need to know how to sound out some CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words, have nine words visually memorized, and be able to connect these words in a sentence. This may be a challenging task for some children. Simple changes like replacing the word “boys” with “kids” in the book would increase its decodability and increase the confidence of a reader attempting their first independent reading of a book.
The HOMER app also asks to record the learner reading the decodable sentence out loud. While the recording may be helpful for a child to think about their fluency in reading a sentence, the app does not check for accuracy. It also praises the child for any attempted answer. Again, it is best to have adult supervision to see that a child is practicing reading correctly.
Spelling Lessons
HOMER Learn & Grow impressively integrates effective early spelling instruction within its platform. The app uses Elkonin boxes in a gamified format, providing a dynamic and interactive learning experience for young readers.
The inclusion of Elkonin boxes is a notable pedagogical choice, as it aids in modeling the segmentation of words into their distinct phonemic components. The instructions in the game present a whole word and then clearly segment the word into its individual parts. The explicit modeling of segmentation is an important phonemic awareness skill necessary for early spelling.
HOMER’s commitment to mixing educational content with interactive gameplay proves to be a valuable asset in making early spelling instruction both enjoyable and effective for kids.
Is the HOMER Learn & Grow App Worth It?
HOMER Learn & Grow stands out as an easy-to-use and enjoyable educational app for young learners.
Its incorporation of a systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) approach for both decoding (word-reading) and encoding (spelling) contributes to a robust foundation in literacy skills. The app successfully combines fun and cuteness with educational content, creating an engaging learning environment.
However, there are a few drawbacks. Though it may seem like a child could use Homer independently successfully, certain features don’t provide the necessary feedback to be effective. This means that adult supervision is required in certain features like the articulation of letter sounds or encouraging active participation in sounding out words. Additionally, some changes could be made in early books in the app to build competence and confidence in kids learning to read.
Lastly, there is room for improvement in the app’s accuracy of letter formation. Addressing these concerns could further enhance the overall effectiveness and appeal of HOMER Learn & Grow for a wider range of young learners.
To learn more and compare phonics apps like HOMER Learn and Grow, check out the resources at phonics.org.
