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Hooked on Phonics App Review

Jaymi Thiessen on March 4, 2024

Hooked on Phonics, established in 1987, emerged as a renowned educational program designed to enhance early reading skills in children. Initially introduced as a set of books and cassette tapes, the program gained widespread popularity for its systematic approach to teaching phonics. This popularity came during the peak of ‘balanced literacy’ instruction which was taking a very different pedagogical stance.

Over the years, Hooked on Phonics evolved with advancements in technology, transitioning into interactive software and digital platforms. Currently, their ‘blended approach’ incorporates physical materials such as books that coincide with the programming in the app.

Hooked on Phonics continues to be a resource for parents and educators seeking effective tools to support literacy development in children. This review focuses on the literacy approach in the Hooked on Phonics app. Learn all about it below!

Organization and Navigation of the App

The Hooked on Phonics app is thoughtfully organized into four distinct categories, catering to various learning needs:

Pre-Reader: This section lays the foundation with alphabet and letter-sound instruction, ensuring a solid start for beginners.
Learn to Read: This category progresses students to learn blending letters and sounds to read words.
Hooked on Spelling: This section is dedicated to spelling and writing words.
Hooked on Math: The math section helps kids explore a robust math curriculum alongside their phonics instruction.

The user experience of the Hooked on Phonics sections is enhanced by easy sign-up and navigation processes, allowing parents and children to navigate the app effortlessly.

A notable feature is the app’s commitment to maintaining a systematic learning path. This is a beneficial approach as it allows children to gradually build upon necessary skills in a step-by-step manner.

Users can revisit and reinforce concepts by repeating games, rewatching fun alphabet letter videos, and rereading books within the app. Games and concepts can also be skipped if your child already has mastery of a concept, ensuring that children are having just the right amount of challenge in their reading practice.

Instructions & Gameplay

The Hooked on Phonics app excels in providing clear and repeatable instructions, catering to children with language or memory concerns. A notable feature is the ability for children to easily turn off background music, enhancing customization to individual preferences and reducing distractions in the game. The games within the app are designed for simplicity, ensuring ease of play for young learners.

Risk of Passive Participation

Many of the games in the app are somewhat passive. Children primarily click on items to check receptive skills without much emphasis on expressive skills.

For example, children are asked to click on the word ‘pig’ next to other words like ‘wig’ and ‘rig,’ but aren’t asked to read the word frequently. In this instance, a child can look at the first letter and choose the right answer without looking at the entire word or reading anything.

Because of the app’s enablement of passive participation, It’s recommended that parents or adults actively monitor the child’s engagement, encouraging them to make sounds or read words aloud to foster more active participation and reinforce expressive skills during the learning process.

Letter-Sound Practice

The Hooked on Phonics app places a strong emphasis on letter-sound instruction, recognizing the pivotal role of letter-sounds in early literacy development. Limited to American English pronunciation, the app introduces letter sounds in a structured and systematic manner, prioritizing the most common sounds to establish a solid foundation for young learners.

One notable strength is the avoidance of adding schwa or extra sounds to the letter sounds. However, some users have reported challenges in deciphering certain letter sounds, such as the sound of the letters <f> and <v>, which could benefit from clearer articulation.

Despite these occasional challenges, the app incorporates engaging and adorable letter videos that contribute to a fun and interactive learning experience. People of a certain age may still remember the old commercials for Hooked on Phonics because they know how to create a jingle that sticks!

These videos not only aid in learning letter sounds but also foster phonemic awareness, contributing to a well-rounded approach to letter-sound instruction.

Reading Words

After letter-sound correspondences are established, Hooked on Phonics uses “word families” to teach word reading. Word families use common rhymes to teach reading. For example, ‘rat’, ‘cat’, and ‘sat’ are all part of the ‘-at’ family. This type of analogy phonics has been shown to help children learn to read words.

However, more current research has compared the effectiveness of analogy and synthetic phonics and has found synthetic phonics to have a greater impact on reading and spelling ability.

Synthetic phonics blends individual letters and sounds together to read words. While any phonics instruction is beneficial, incorporating more emphasis on modeling and practicing individual phoneme blending could enhance the program’s efficacy.

Reading Books

Some lesson sequences in Hooked on Phonics end with the reading of a book. The Hooked on Phonics app uses decodable books, which means that the words a child reads align with the words they have been taught how to read.

Many of the books in this app are highly decodable which supports early readers in solidifying phonics knowledge in continuous texts. Any irregular words in the text are introduced and practiced before the child reads the book, which is another positive scaffold to help new readers. Additionally, these books can be revisited in the in-app library for repeated practice at any time.

The books within the Hooked on Phonics app could benefit from the addition of comprehension questions to ensure the child has understood the sentences and stories they have decoded. This is something parents could do with their children after reading a book together.

Spelling

Spelling instruction begins with a short video with direct and explicit instruction and explanations of the skill the child will then practice. This is a strength of the Hooked on Phonics app as both children and adults can quickly learn key spelling concepts in a short amount of time.

In the app, early spelling instruction largely focuses on a ‘word family’ approach. Initially, children are asked to sort words they hear into word families. For example, does the word ‘rap’ fit in with the ‘-an’ family or the ‘-ap’ family? The full sample word is already spelled in the game, which leaves room for children to play this spelling game without paying attention to sounds in the words. That is not ideal.

The next spelling activity has children sort word families and letters into separate boxes to ‘unscramble’ a word. This activity resembles the common practice of Elkonin boxes, however, these boxes should represent individual sounds, not word families.

Similarly, consonant blends like ‘sl-’ or ‘dr-’ are placed in the same box instead of two separate boxes, one for each sound. The spelling activities could be improved by using individual letter sounds more often to spell (synthetic phonics).

Evidence & Research

Some versions of Hooked on Phonics have been around for 37 years. Surprisingly, there are no studies evaluating its effectiveness.

What Works Clearinghouse evaluates high-quality scientific evidence supporting different educational methods and approaches. Regarding this phonics app, WWC states they are “unable to draw any research-based conclusions about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of Hooked on Phonics.”

As the educational landscape evolves, it would be beneficial for Hooked on Phonics to incorporate contemporary research findings into its materials and reference more recent studies to back up its effectiveness.

Unsubstantiated Advertising Claims

That said, the history of Hooked on Phonics involves notable scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 1994, which demanded that the program’s manufacturer either discontinue its advertising campaign or conduct more extensive research into the program’s effectiveness, while also disclosing any evidence of failure. However, 30 years later, it appears that this demand has not been fully addressed.

Despite this history, Hooked on Phonics continues to assert its bold claim with the current motto: “Your Child Will Read, Guaranteed.” It’s important for consumers to critically evaluate such claims and be aware of the ongoing need for transparency and up-to-date research to support the efficacy of educational programs. No app can claim to teach every child to read.

Is the Hooked on Phonics App Worth It?

The Hooked on Phonics app offers a user-friendly and enjoyable experience that is likely to aid children in learning to read. The app’s ease of use, engaging content, and cute features contribute positively to the learning process for both children and adults. The decodable books in this app are simple and clear, supporting new readers in their practice.

However, the literacy instruction in the app could benefit from updates. The type of phonics instruction, expressive engagement from learners, and a reassessment of the program’s claims could use more attention.

While the Hooked on Phonics app remains a popular choice for parents and educators, an ongoing commitment to evidence-based practices and transparency in advertising claims could further enhance its effectiveness and reputation in literacy education.
To stay up to date with phonics program reviews, instruction methods, and educational insights from experts, follow phonics.org.

Hooked on Phonics Ratings

Overall rating: 3.5 stars

Quality of Literacy Instruction: 3.5 out of 5

Usability: 4 out of 5

Engagement: 3 out of 5

Building Early Literacy Skills: Teach Your Monster to Read Review

Jaymi Thiessen on February 24, 2024

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!

Reading Eggs Review for Phonics Education

Jaymi Thiessen on February 17, 2024

Reading Eggs is a well-known education app. It has a comprehensive and expansive array of activities to choose from for children aged 2-13 in both British and American English. It’s widely used by both parents and educators to support children’s reading and math instruction.

The Reading Eggs program contains three distinct programs: Fast Phonics, Reading Eggs, and Reading Eggspress. Beyond these programs, Reading Eggs also boasts an impressive digital library.

In this review, literacy experts at phonics.org shed light on the quality of literacy instruction in the smaller, embedded Reading Eggs program. Keep reading to discover the pros and cons!

Reading Eggs App Navigation

Several features stand out when we look at the user navigation of Reading Eggs—some positive and some left to be desired.

Diverse Login Options

Reading Eggs offers a range of convenient login methods, encouraging accessibility for both students and parents. The inclusion of options such as QR code scanning and personalized informational login letters sent home enhances the user experience. These letters can be automatically translated into 11 different languages making accessibility easier for English language learners and their families.

Visual and Auditory Overwhelm

The app’s design may pose challenges for young or neurodiverse users as it tends to be visually and auditorily overwhelming. Children have to fluctuate volume controls, given the fluctuating sound levels throughout the app. This adds a layer of complexity that isn’t beneficial for kids.

Program Complexity

Each of the three programs—Fast Phonics, Reading Eggs, and Reading Eggspress—comes with its own set of navigation and organizational structures. Reading Eggs, in particular, introduces elements like “Peaks,” “Maps,” and “Phases,” which may appear complex even to well-trained educators.

These details could potentially hinder swift and intuitive navigation within the app or make it challenging for educators to align instruction with the systematic approach in the app. There’s also a noticeable amount of dead or broken links within the educator navigation portion of the app, which increases navigation difficulty.

Research-Based Foundation

What type of phonics instruction does the Reading Eggs app use, and is it helpful? Let’s consider the important factors.

Use of Synthetic Phonics Instruction

Many of the Reading Eggs games and activities use a synthetic phonics approach. This means individual letters and sounds are blended to read words and segmented to spell words. This is backed by research as one of the most effective forms of phonics instruction.

Reading Eggs offers a large variety of games and activities to build phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, and reading comprehension skills in a systematic, explicit way. The Reading Eggs app is transparent about the scope and sequences they use, as well as the research and evidence to back up this approach. As a company, Reading Eggs offers excellent staff training and online webinars to support educators in understanding how to use the app and why this approach is effective.

Reading Eggs Study

Reading Eggs claims to be supported by research, as indicated by a study highlighted on their website. However, a critical examination reveals that the study employed the Fountas and Pinnell Benchmark Assessment System as a measure of reading ability. It’s worth noting that there is substantial criticism about the effectiveness of this particular assessment system in accurately gauging a child’s reading proficiency. This raises concerns about the validity and reliability of the research-backed claims made by Reading Eggs.

Errors and Inaccuracies

The main downsides of Reading Eggs as an education app relate to inaccuracies and the pace of lessons.

Inaccurate Short Vowel Sounds

One of the most difficult and important skills to acquire when learning to read words is the automatic recognition of short vowel sounds and letters. Associating a keyword with a short vowel sound can be an incredibly helpful touchstone when learning to read. Reading Eggs uses these keywords alongside embedded picture mnemonics which embed a picture/keyword into the visual look of the letter. This isn’t just cute, it is research-based to help children remember these important sounds.

Unfortunately, the app isn’t always accurate. For example, Reading Eggs chose the keyword and picture ‘orange’ for the letter <O>. The first sound in orange is not the short /ŏ/ sound. This representation appears many times on the Reading Eggs site including printable materials such as the “sound mat”. The placement test for the entire app even asks a child to, “click on /ŏ/ as in ‘orange’”. An example of an accurate picture and sound that could have been used is an ‘olive’ as it begins with the accurate sound of short /ŏ/ and is already in a conveniently round shape.

Short vowel sounds are foundational and tricky in learning to read. Inaccuracies like this can be confusing and frustrating for children who are trying to learn to read words.

Missed Opportunities in Word Pronunciation

High Frequency Words in Reading Eggs are sometimes taught using visual identification of the whole word like in its games “Leaping Penguins” and “Golden Goose”. The child is told a target word to look for and then shown a sample of words to choose from. When the child chooses the correct word, a “ding” sound indicates they were right. In this teaching practice, verbal pronunciation of the visual word should be repeated as many times as possible. It would be optimal for the child to hear the correct pronunciation of the word every time they click on it.

Fast-Paced Reading Activities

One of the most important activities within Reading Eggs is the “Blend a Word” game, where individual sounds are named with their corresponding letters and then combined to form a word. The instructional model is followed by a prompt for the child to repeat the process. However, a notable inadequacy is the swift pace at which this activity progresses. The rapid pace of the game may hinder the learning experience, especially for children who require more time to process and practice these foundational skills.

Additionally, limited opportunities for children to repeat and blend sounds adequately may result in less effective learning outcomes.

Introducing more interactivity and allowing for a more flexible pace in this aspect of the game would better support all children, including those who may need additional time to master the blending of sounds.

Reading Eggs’ Digital Library

Diversity & Variety of Books

Reading Eggs has a digital library with over 3500 different book titles, including:

Fiction
Nonfiction
Leveled books
Decodable books
Books that can be read aloud to a child
Books a child can read themselves

Notably, the Reading Eggs library also contains a First Nations series which is a culturally diverse and beautiful addition to the types of stories children can hear and learn about.

Different Types of Text

The Reading Eggs digital library has decodable books. Decodable books are phonetically controlled texts that only ask children to read words they’ve been taught and have practiced how to read. Decodable texts discourage guessing by relying on pictures in the stories and encourage decoding by looking at the words and sounding them out.

The decodable texts in Reading Eggs are cute and generally aligned with the scope and sequence provided. Some books do appear less decodable than others, such as the early introduction of multisyllabic words.

Additionally, when searching for decodables, the library features a Lexile, F & P level, or Reading Recovery level for the decodable books. Ideally, decodable books would be ‘leveled’ by their place in the scope and sequence or by outlining skills the child needs to know before reading.

Is Reading Eggs a Good Phonics App?

Reading Eggs stands out as a robust educational app, offering an extensive range of activities and a diverse digital library to support literacy and math skills in young learners.

While its multilingual features and login options contribute to accessibility, the app is not without its challenges. Complex navigation, overwhelming visuals and audio, and pacing issues in critical activities raise concerns about the overall user experience.

Despite these challenges, Reading Eggs could be an interesting resource to supplement systematic literacy instruction, especially if improvements are made to enhance the accuracy of phonics instruction, user navigation, and instructional pacing.

To discover more phonics apps that are effective for kids, check out our library of reviews here!