Reading.com App Review {A learn to read app for kids}

There are tons of ways to teach your kids to read, including lots of apps.

Whether you’re a homeschooler or just looking to give your kids some extra practice or give your young child a head start an app can be a fun way to go.

In this post I want to walk you through one of my favorite reading and phonics apps for kids, reading.com.

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We use our reading.com app as part of our reading curriculum. For my 5 year old we use it as part of our reading/phonics curriculum. For my 7 year old it’s used for review and because she loves all things screen.

For other curriculum options check out my breakdown of the best Phonics Curriculums.

How does the app work?

Up in the corner is the grown-up section. It will take you back to where you can access different profiles. You can use this for more than one child.

The lessons screen is going to be the main place where you start your lessons.

When you click a lesson you do have to put in some numbers so the kids can’t start the lessons without you as the lessons are  meant to be done with a parent and child together.

There’s going to be several sections for each lesson. Occasionally there are shorter lessons that are more like a review but most of the lessons look like the one below.

Each lesson starts with your alphabet song which is really fun. The song goes through each letter and you say words that start with that sound. Songs are always a great way to help kids learn new information.

You can check out our How to teach kids their address post which also includes a song.

Next is letter review when you’re going to review your previous letters that you’ve already learned.

One of our favorite things about this app is that it has sliders in here so it makes it sort of interactive for kids.

Ready to check it out? Grab a free trial or keep reading to learn more.

The white section at the top is always going to be what the parent or whoever is teaching is going to be saying. It’s your little prompt.

After that you’re going to learn your new letter.

Next is sound stories. They are really fun and silly. Kids can listen for the words that start with the sound you’re learning in this lesson.

Then, we move on to the next section and do some letter writing. First you’re going to use the little prompt just to get your hand moving the right way.

Then, you’re going to be able to trace and then write it yourself. If the child makes a mistake or they want to practice again there is an undo button which is nice. 

Note: If your child is left-handed like mine, the first part of the writing section can be a bit annoying as you have to follow the arrow and it writes letters like a right-handed person. I just remind her that she has to follow the arrows but then in the tracing and free writing part she can write the letters the left-handed way.

This is a downfall of most apps and curriculums as they are designed for right-handed writers.

Next we’ll do the Quick Check section. Quick check is just going to check to make sure we don’t need to review anything before we move on.

Your child may be able to do these early sections with little help. Now we get into the meat of the learning, the word reading and book section.

In the word reading section we learn words that we’re going to use in the book. Sometimes there are more, sometimes there are less.

The dots on the left-hand side will show you how many more you have to do before the section is done.

It’s going to go through a whole bunch of words. I always remind my daughter to put them in her head after.

This section will also occasionally feature a sight word. The white part will let you know if it’s a sight word and the slider underneath the word will be orange to help you and your child remember.

We’re almost to the end of the reading.com lesson now. It’s time to put those words to use and read a book.

The early books are all co-reading books so you’ll read the gray part and then the white part is the part your child will read. You can click on that section and that helps make it bigger and then they can use the sliders to trace under each word.

The books do build on each other so some of the words will be ones they learned in this lesson and others will be from previous lessons. They likely will need to sound out many of the words again.

We usually read it a couple times so they can re-read the words and actually understand the sentence after they sound out the words.

Once they’ve read that page they can move their finger over the other page and it gives you a picture. Then, you’re going to flip the page and repeat until the story is done.

After you complete the story there are some reading comprehension questions. These will often include open ended questions asking why a character did something or how they felt. Then, there will frequently be a section where they put pictures from the story in the correct order.

Then the lesson is over. The entire lesson usually takes 10-15 minutes as most of the sections move quickly.

While the lessons are designed to be done together there are some other areas they can do alone. They can go into books and they reread only the books that you’ve already done or you can read them together as extra practice.

There are also some games where they can get some more tracing practice or practice finding items that start with a certain letter sound.

If you want to get an idea of what’s taught in each lesson you can find the scope and sequence here:

https://reading-com.helpscoutdocs.com/article/280-what-does-the-program-cover-curriculum-with-scope-sequence

Pros & Cons of the reading.com app

Let’s wrap up some of the pros and cons of the reading.com app.

I hope you enjoy this app as much as we do!

Thanks for sharing!