Teach Your Monster to Read is an engaging and visually appealing literacy app intended for children from 3-6 years old. It was developed by the Edoki Academy and is a part of the Usborne Foundation.
Teach Your Monster to Read uses in-app storytelling to engage children in helping their “monster” learn to read and fix their spaceship while exploring various islands on a far-away planet. In this review, we’ll explore the key features, educational value, and overall user experience of this popular literacy app.
Benefits of Teach Your Monster to Read
The Teach Your Monster to Read app has many benefits that help children learn how to read. These aspects encourage motivation to continue playing and learning. Most importantly, many features of this app are in line with what reading research has found to be effective ways of learning to read and spell.
Engaging and Motivating
One of the immediate strengths of the app is its vibrant and user-friendly interface. The colorful, whimsical design instantly captures the attention of young learners, creating an inviting environment for them to explore and engage.
The app provides positive reinforcement through rewards and prizes, encouraging children to continue playing and practicing their literacy skills. Kids can collect stars and use them to select items to customize their adorable monsters. This feature is a fun add-on and doesn’t appear to be too distracting. The use of gamification elements adds a sense of fun to the learning process, making it more likely that children will stay engaged and motivated to continue learning.
Research-Based Reading Instruction Methods
Teach Your Monster to Read uses a systematic and synthetic phonics approach. The systematic approach refers to teaching phonics in an explicit, step-by-step method.
Teach Your Monster to Read starts by teaching and practicing letter sounds in a specific order. Children are then encouraged to blend these sounds to read words. In this way, children learn new information piece by piece.
Synthetic phonics means that individual speech sounds (or phonemes) are blended to read words. This is different from other types of phonics that use word families or chunks to word-read (decode). Reading research supports synthetic phonics as being the optimal choice for teaching children to read.
Building Reading Skills
Teach Your Monster to Read encourages phonemic awareness skills such as “blending” and “segmenting.” Blending involves combining or putting sounds together to read words. Segmenting is breaking a word into its individual speech sounds. The inclusion of these skills is important for learning how to read and spell.
Individualized Learning Paths
There are three options for beginning this app: First Steps, Fun with Words, and Champion Reader. Ideally, a parent or educator can choose which path will most benefit their child or student when beginning the app.
This app also has some adaptive learning features including re-introducing previous mistakes for continued practice. The “Practice” section of the app allows an educator or parent to choose specific letter sounds or word types for a child to practice with a variety of different easy-to-play games.
Drawbacks of the Teach Your Monster to Read App
While Teach Your Monster to Read excels in many areas, it’s important to consider certain aspects that might pose challenges for a diverse audience. There are several limitations and weaknesses in this game to be aware of.
Sound Articulation
The way speech sounds are pronounced or articulated is incredibly important when teaching someone to read. Teach Your Monster to Read relies on British English articulation. Some speech sounds, such as the /r/ sound, may not align with the accents or pronunciation commonly encountered outside of British English.
This articulation setting could potentially create confusion for learners who are exposed to different regional accents. These specific sounds are often difficult for children to learn to pronounce, which also makes these sounds more difficult to read and spell. Ideally, children should learn phonics through a literacy approach that matches the pronunciation of their regional dialect.
Letter Introduction and Accuracy
Furthermore, Teach Your Monster to Read occasionally introduces words that use sounds that haven’t been taught yet. Some of these words are referred to as “trickies”. These are words frequently used in children’s texts that may not follow a regular phonics pattern.
However, other irregular words that are not “trickies” are still introduced as though they follow a regular phonics pattern. For example, the word “kind” is introduced quite early in the game. While children are taught that the letter i makes a short /i/ sound like “insect”, the letter <i> in “kind” makes a different, long vowel sound. This departure from the established learning path could lead to confusion for young readers and disrupt the systematic approach to phonics instruction.
Learning Pace and Stage
There are options in the app to customize the learning experience for a child. However, the system in this app has not been perfected.
The first game choice (“First Steps”) includes learning letters and sounds. The next game choice (“Fun with Words) is for children who are reading sentences. There is a large gap between these skills. Children who know letter sounds but are not yet able to read sentences may find the first stage repetitive and easy and the next stage too challenging.
Ideally, the app should have a placement quiz at the beginning of the game to help pinpoint where the child should begin. Alternatively, having an option for parents and educators to skip ahead to the correct starting place for their child or student would be helpful.
Clarity of Directions
Unfortunately, many of the directions in the Teach Your Monster to Read mini-games cannot be repeated. Repetition of sounds and target words for learning is so important for new readers. It can be frustrating to play a game where the directions or unclear or key words are missed.
Without clear direction, children may tend to ‘guess’ at words or sounds instead of doing the important work of learning letter sounds and blending. Parents and educators can help their child or student by immediately turning down the music volume in the app, which can help focus on the directions and sounds introduced in the game.
Passive Participation
Many of the mini-games are exploitable and can be completed without actually knowing letter sounds or word-reading skills. Kids could potentially click around to get the ‘right’ answers to move along in the game.
Furthermore, many of the activities and tasks in the game test for receptive skills rather than expressive skills. For example, children could be asked to identify a certain word out of a variety, but often they don’t need to produce that sound or read the words themselves. The expressive skills are often more challenging and parents can play along to encourage their child’s full participation.
Teach Your Monster to Read: Overall Rating
Teach Your Monster to Read offers a rich and engaging platform for early literacy education. It uses a systematic synthetic phonics approach to teaching word reading in a fun way.
Addressing concerns with customization of the learning pace and articulation settings as well as encouraging active participation in learning activities could make the app even more accessible and accommodating to a wider range of users.
Want more phonics program reviews and teaching tips? Explore phonics.org for resources on all things phonics!
