ABCmouse.com is an educational app tailored for children ages 2 to 8. It offers more than 10,000 activities and 850 lessons that foster learning in a variety of subjects. 

If you want to know the quality of ABCmouse lessons, keep reading. This review takes a close look at the literacy lessons and games available in the app. 

Rewards in ABCmouse Lessons 

ABCmouse lessons provide in-app rewards to motivate and engage young learners. Children earn tickets for completing lessons and games, which they can then use to purchase items such as accessories for their avatars or virtual pets to play with. 

Rewards can be engaging for young children. However, research suggests extrinsic rewards may actually hinder an inner desire to learn. ABCmouse’s focus on games and rewards may also introduce distractions from the educational parts of the app. 

How Does ABCmouse Work?

ABCmouse.com can be played in a free-form style where children choose from a large selection of activities based on their interests. There is also a “learning path” option where children follow lessons in a structured, step-by-step way. 

Different subjects are introduced along the learning path including literacy-based activities. A description of this learning path or Scope and Sequence is easily accessible on the ABCmouse.com website for educators and parents to refer to. Additionally, the path can be customized by an adult to best suit the needs of an individual child or student.

One questionable aspect of this structure is that children are expected to read and spell words outside of the provided learning path. Learners in Kindergarten may be given challenging tasks such as spelling words with diphthongs, a concept that is not introduced until grade 2 on the learning path. This can be discouraging for early readers as they try to complete tasks that exceed their current skills and abilities.  

Learning to Read Words in the App

The ABCmouse.com Scope and Sequence includes 40 “High-Frequency Words” for pre-kindergarten and another 54 words in the Kindergarten program. “High-frequency words” are words that are commonly seen in children’s texts. 

The games and activities in ABCmouse encourage kids to remember these words based on their visual appearance. Some games ask children to match a word to its outline or shape, which is an instruction method that does not help with learning to read. 

According to experts, learning letter sounds and blending is a more efficient, effective method of learning to read words. Frequent words such as “in” are easily read by blending the two sounds /i/ and /n/ together. Memorizing the outer shape of this word does not help a child remember or identify it in the future.

ABCmouse Phonics Lessons 

The phonics lessons and games on ABCmouse.com focus on word families or analogy phonics. For example, “not”, “pot”, and “lot” are all words in the “-ot” word family. Analogy phonics can support a child’s ability to read words but it may not be the most efficient or effective type of phonics to use. 

The Clackmannanshire Report, a study on reading and literacy development, compared different types of phonics instruction over a 7-year period. Synthetic phonics was found to have the most impact on reading and spelling achievement as opposed to other methods including analogy phonics. 

Synthetic phonics involves teaching individual letter sounds and blending those sounds to read words. For example, the sounds /p/ /o/ /t/ can be blended to read the word “pot”. The ABCmouse app could improve its phonics lessons by incorporating synthetic phonics instead of focusing on word families. 

A Digital Library for Early Readers 

ABCmouse.com has a large digital library of over 450 children’s books. These include fiction and nonfiction books that parents can read aloud to children and that early readers can read to themselves. The large variety of books in the collection provides an immediate library that caters to any child’s interests. 

Stepped Readers

The “Stepped Readers” or leveled books in the library are intended for early readers to read themselves. The earliest stepped readers are predictable books, meaning the same sentence is repeated and then one word changes on each page. The changed word corresponds with the picture in the book. In this way, children can memorize and repeat a phrase to guess the word based on the pictures. 

Words Outside of Scope and Sequence

Books in ABCmouse also have many words that are outside of the scope and sequence (or learning path) presented in the app. For example, one of the Step 2 books contains the word “gardener”. Reading the word “gardener” requires a child to know how to read a 3-syllable word with R-controlled vowels, but these skills aren’t introduced until Step 9 of the app. 

Aside from being confusing, this can further encourage new readers to use pictures as a crutch to guess words in a story. This may limit an early reader from developing proper reading skills. When pictures are taken out of books, children no longer have this ineffective strategy to rely on. 

Teaching new readers to rely on guessing words instead of sounding them out is not supported by educational research. It’s a strategy that readers with underdeveloped literacy skills rely on and is therefore a weak point in the ABCmouse program.

Alphabet Games: Letter Formation 

ABCmouse.com includes a letter tracing game that allows children to practice the early literacy skill of forming letters. In the activity, a short video models how to make the letter and then instructs the child to trace the letter with their finger. 

There are several concerns with this activity. First, it can be easily exploited by kids. A child could create any shape (or scribble) over the letter and be rewarded for writing the letter “correctly.” An adult should observe their child using this app to make sure the child traces the letter properly. 

Another concern is that the video model of making the letter does not follow the letter formations commonly taught by occupational therapists or educators. For a more accurate alphabet tracing practice, you might want to try a different phonics app.

Is ABCmouse Worth It?

ABCmouse.com has a deep catalog of activities, games, and books for children to engage with. It makes educational activities fun and engaging but it also has a few shortcomings.

The educational quality of the ABCmouse phonics program is limited because it relies on visual memorization of whole words instead of teaching children how to sound words out. 

Although a “learning path” is provided, the words that children are expected to read and spell often veer from this path, presenting overly challenging tasks to new learners. As a result, children may learn unhelpful reading strategies when they should be learning how to sound out (decode) words properly. 

Looking for more effective phonics instruction apps to help your child learn to read? Visit phonics.org to explore the best options available today.