Reading Eggs is an excellent academic and recreational product! Over the past couple weeks, my son has been working through different letters of the alphabet and short words such as "am" and "at". Along with the lessons, he is also able to play games, hear songs, and explore with his custom avatar. This program is reinforcing the letters of the alphabet and their sounds along with beginning lessons in spelling and reading. I also really liked that the website offers downloadable print-out activities to reinforce what the child has learned.

I like that it had pre-reading activities. We used the Reading Egg Juniors and they had a huge variety of activities. There were games, books, and songs! Some of our favorite activities were the puzzles and songs. We got to build each letter of the alphabet and learn what sound that letter made. We loved Reading Eggs!

Children practice reading skills based on a placement test that exposes them to skills that need to be further developed. The program incorporates essential skills that children need in order to read, such as phonemic awareness, phonics, and comprehension to name a few. Children take an initial placement test that puts them on a path that is best suited for skills they need to develop further, so the practice is child-specific. Reading Eggs isn't just a platform through which children can practice previously taught skills, they offer short video lessons (at least in our experience in the early stages of reading) that introduce the skill that is going to be practiced.

I like the range of skills that are offered and the personalized placement. The practice is in game form, which makes it more enjoyable for kids and there is plenty of variety. I like that the program offers mini lessons prior to practice instead of just practice. An added bonus is that Reading Eggs also offers a library full of online books for kids to explore.

What I liked the most was the teaching style of the letters and sounds employed by Reading Eggs. The synthetic phonics approach of putting the emphasis on hearing and identifying the phonemes (sounds) in all positions and then synthesising, or blending them to make a word removes guessing, accelerates understanding, and quickly builds student confidence. The combination of synthetic phonics with sight word training in sequential lessons that match an individual letter, or letter combination, with its appropriate sound and then blended all the way through a word provides an ideal environment for reading success. Children learn to recognize each letter, letter combinations, corresponding sounds, and learn to read the whole word as well as spell it.

My daughter and I tried out Reading Eggs together. Since she is already learning to read, we took the placement test to see where she should start. The activities were a nice mix of reading and creating words. My daughter stayed engaged for a long time with the lessons because she wanted to find out what the next activity was like, so the mix of different activities were very motivating. The game-like environment allowed you to collect rewards for each completed lesson and use them to buy virtual goods and go to other virtual activities like a video arcade.

A parent section allows you to see your child's progress and print out activities that reinforce the same skills on paper using the same images and similar tasks. My daughter described the characters as "weird" but she had a lot of fun inventing her own combination of arms, legs, etc. to create her own avatar.

Overall, I feel that reading eggs provides solid phonics and sight word instruction, although it would need to be filled in with other kinds of reading instruction to really promote comprehension and enjoyment of reading. For children who are motivated by external rewards, I think it would be an excellent way to start learning to read.