Phonics.org takes a closer look at the activities used in literacy apps so that you can make better choices for your child. 

Read on to learn more about the Duck Duck Moose: Reading app. 

Overview/Description

Duck Duck Moose: Reading is a cost- and ad-free reading app developed in association with Khan Academy. It is intended for children up to the age of 5. With nine games, this app aims to achieve three critical literacy milestones:

• Recognition and naming of uppercase and lowercase letters.
• Demonstrating knowledge of letter-sound correspondences.
• Isolating and pronouncing sounds in CVC (Consonant-Vowel-Consonant) words.

Duck Duck Moose App Usability

There are positive and negative aspects to the ease of use and navigation in the Duck Duck Moose: Reading app. 

Sign-Up and Reporting

Several features of Duck Duck Moose make the app easy to use:

• The app has an easy-to-follow sign-up process. 
• Adding a new user or child player is equally straightforward. 
• The dedicated “Parents” area provides a detailed report on each user’s progress, which is a helpful feature. 
• Reporting includes percentages for consonant and short vowel sound recognition and a breakdown of mastered letters. 

The app also has sequential lessons that are introduced one after another. This eliminates the need for a child to navigate around the app, making sure usability is intuitive and suitable for young children who play with the app. 

Game Instructions

Duck Duck Moose: Reading presents some challenges in usability that might hinder the learning experience for certain users. 

Instructions are solely provided at the beginning of each game, with no option for repetition. This limitation may prove frustrating for children who benefit from auditory reinforcement or clarification. 

While instructions eventually cycle back, the lack of immediate repetition renders the game ineffective for users who missed initial prompts. 

Navigation

Unfortunately, once a child is playing the game there doesn’t appear to be a way to exit the game and go back to the main menu. If your child is playing and you want to check their progress or ‘report,’ you’ll have to exit the app entirely and restart from scratch to get to the parent area or main menu. 

App Activity and Engagement

The Duck Duck Moose app incorporates engaging elements that capture children’s interest, such as its animal theme and lively characters. Positive verbal reinforcement, character songs, and character dancing further enhance engagement. 

However, several factors of this app can detract from a child’s desire to engage with it. For example, all players start from the same point regardless of their existing knowledge or early literacy skills.

While the app offers nine different games, many of them follow similar concepts of feeding animals the correct sounds or letters. This repetition may bore some users. 

Game responses primarily involve receptive tapping or dragging actions. Also, the app games can be easily exploited by randomly tapping or dragging—actual literacy knowledge isn’t always involved for kids to play the games. 

Quality of Literacy Instruction

The following characteristics of Duck Duck Moose: Reading contribute to the overall quality of literacy instruction it provides. 

Letter-Sound Connections

This literacy app presents letter sounds that are accurate for American English. The sounds are clearly articulated and there are many options to practice making this connection. This repetition is helpful for children who are learning these letters and sounds. 

Vocabulary

When learners tap on pictures of images in the games, the pronunciation of the word is given. This association helps young learners expand their vocabulary knowledge which is foundational for reading comprehension. 

Direct Teaching

Duck Duck Moose does not use any direct instruction to guide its learners. Rather than guiding children through new concepts, the app often requires them to practice skills without prior explanation or instruction. Simply saying, “The letter m says /mmmmm/” or something similar would have helped provide some guidance and instruction to children. 

This lack of direct guidance may leave children feeling lost or frustrated as they attempt to navigate unfamiliar tasks. Without clear instruction, users are expected to infer connections between sounds or letters independently, which can be challenging, especially for beginners. 

Overall, the absence of direct phonics instruction in Duck Duck Moose: Reading limits its effectiveness as an educational tool for early literacy development.

Letter Sequence

Duck Duck Moose claims to introduce letter sounds in an order that “is based on the frequency of letters in everyday language and the order in which students tend to learn them.” 

Unfortunately, the app doesn’t indicate what this order is ahead of time. It would be especially helpful to see which letters are taught in which order to encourage instructional support. 

Furthermore, the app’s sequence of letters is not ideal. Teaching the letter and sound /h/ first is an odd choice. The letter /h/ is often not introduced at the beginning stages of letter instruction as it’s kind of tricky to teach, practice, and blend.

Reading and Spelling Instruction

The Duck Duck Moose: Reading app says that it aims to help children isolate and “pronounce sounds in CVC words”. The app does this by having children pick missing sounds from a CVC word or put the letters from a CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) word in order. These manipulation and spelling activities are generally helpful for children to practice spelling. 

However, Duck Duck Moose has children completing these challenging spelling and manipulation activities without first showing them how to read a word. How is a child supposed to put the letters in ‘gum’ in order without first knowing how to read a word? This app has no instructions on how to blend sounds from left to right to read a word. This is a significant oversight. 

Sequential Learning

Letter-sound, reading, and spelling instruction should be sequential and systematic. This means skills are taught in a certain order and when they are mastered new skills are introduced; step-by-step. Duck Duck Moose does this by having children practice a few letters and sounds and when they have mastered these few, they add a few new letters. 

However, the app doesn’t consistently stick to this concept. The spelling activities in this app do not follow the letters and sounds that have been practiced first. If a child hasn’t learned or practiced a letter-sound association yet they will not know how to use those letters and sounds in reading and spelling. This is another significant oversight in the design of Duck Duck Moose: Reading. 

Overview of Duck Duck Moose: Reading App

Overall, Duck Duck Moose: Reading presents a mixed bag of positive and not-so-positive elements conducive to early literacy instruction. 

The app offers some user-friendly features such as easy sign-up and sequential lessons. However, its instructions cannot be repeated and navigating to different areas of the app isn’t intuitive. 

Engagement is initially sparked by the app’s animal theme and the use of positive reinforcement but is diminished by repetitive gameplay and passive interaction methods. Moreover, the app’s instructional approach falls short in providing direct instruction and fails to scaffold learning effectively. 

The Duck Duck Moose: Reading app has potential, but requires significant improvements to better support early literacy instruction and engagement for young learners. Parents and educators seeking effective literacy apps may need to explore alternative options to ensure comprehensive learning experiences for children.

Check out the latest phonics program reviews on phonics.org to see what other literacy apps have to offer.

Duck Duck Moose Reading App: Rating

Quality of Literacy Instruction: 2 / 5

Usability: 2 / 5

Engagement: 2 / 5