Academics' Choice Award™ Winner
PocketPhonics Stories
Ages: 4 - 7Price: $22.99
Type: Mobile App, Book
By Apps in My Pocket Ltd
Description
PocketPhonics Stories is a step-by-step reading programme for 4 to 7 year-olds that includes 42 storybooks. Based on the award-winning PocketPhonics used in hundreds of American elementary schools, it guides children through the literacy journey, beginning with helping children to learn their first letter sounds and ending with them being able to read 42 stories within the app by themselves.
PocketPhonics Stories is split in to 12 groups of letter sounds, each group is followed by a set of storybooks that contain those letter sounds. Once the child has mastered one group of letter sounds, they progress to reading the storybooks that tests their knowledge of these letter sounds. They read storybooks that are on the right level for them. Once that task is completed they then move on to the next group of sounds, and so on.
In the first group of letter sounds, there are six sounds to master before the child will be able to complete their first storybook. Based on our experience with PocketPhonics, most children of four and over will start to read their first storybook within 10 weeks if they are using the app for 15 minutes every day.
Parents and teachers can easily monitor children’s progress online. They can see what stage the child is currently at, any letter sounds they are having difficulty with and what storybooks have been read. Furthermore, teachers and parents are also emailed a certificate when a child completes a letter sound stage. These certificates are a much-loved feature of the original PocketPhonics app, which launched in 2008 and has been downloaded over half a million times.
In PocketPhonics Stories, children can tap an unfamiliar word in a story, the app will sound out the letters to help remind the child what the word says. If that’s not enough, they can tap again to hear the actual word and see a picture that illustrates its meaning. The storybooks introduce gradually high-frequency words like “the” and “to” that cannot be decoded easily.
At the end of the story, the app tests the child on the new words in that story. Each word is spoken in turn, and the child has to select the written form of the word. Only once they are able to correctly identify all the words in all the books on this level, does the app move on to teach them the next group of letter sounds.
It is aligned with the Common Core State Standards. Specifically, children master the following skills:
* writing letters (two different writing styles plus cursive option)
* recognising 72 letter sounds (e.g. ‘ch’ are the letters that make the initial sound in ‘chat’)
* blending letter sounds together to make words (e.g ‘ch-a-t’)
* hearing a word and selecting its written form (e.g. the app says, “chat”, the child has to select ‘chat’ from a group of words - some of which are similar to chat)
Teachers don't need to worry about making sure kids have the same iPad each lesson, simplifying the management of iPads in schools. If a child switches iPads, they automatically continue learning from where they finished previously. Children can use the app at home, and continue from where they left off at school.
Review Highlights:
PocketPhonics Stories is a logically sequenced phonics program that includes 42 short stories for children between the ages of 4-7. The app begins with basic letter identification. The woman's voice asks the child to first say, then write specific consonant sounds. The child receives immediate feedback in the way they write the letters on the ipad. In this single exercise alone a child is asked to use his/her visual, verbal, and tactile skills. The app progresses into phonemic awareness, digraphs and diphthongs, blending and segmenting. Sight words are slowly introduced throughout the 42 books. At the end of each book the child is then assessed to be sure he/she knows how to read each word individually.
I liked how Apps in My Pocket sequenced each activity, building upon previous understanding. I thought the assessment at the end of each story was the icing on the cake. It was very helpful to be able to access my son's progress as well.
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