Teach Your Monsters To Read

Teach Your Monster to Read: First Steps is a free online game from the Usborne Foundation to help children practise and consolidate the essential first stages of reading.

It engages young children from the off because they get to build their own on screen monster following directions from Simon Farnaby from BBC’s Horrible Histories.  Many drills and skills programs are competitive and driven by the need to win points. So often children focus on their score and learning is not embedded and does not transfer to other situations.

This program takes a different approach. The main focus is the narrative: a monster has crashed his spaceship in a strange land. He cannot read his handbook and needs to rebuild his craft and fly home. The child guides him through a series of islands, identifying letters and sounds and building blends.

Teach Your Monster to Read: First Steps helps children get to grips with synthetic phonics and has been a real winner in schools which are using it as Katie Hanley: Senior Teacher KS1/ Language and Literacy Leader at Canonbury Primary School, London has found, “There is currently nothing of this standard available at the moment for teachers/ parents and the fact it is also free of charge in incredible. It fits perfectly with the Letters and Sounds programme, so can be tied in to any phonics lesson. The graphics are amazing which will engage the pupils and ensure they are motivated. I particularly loved the fact teachers can look at the progress of individual pupils in relation to the grapheme/phoneme correspondences.”

I am not quite so keen on the graphics as Katie. The colours looked quite muddy on my screen and I find he music irritating but I really like the concept. Having built their monster, children are quite protective of him and Simon Farnaby’s voice is a definite bonus. The exercises are varied and help move learners on so that their letter and sound recognition becomes much more automatic. What I suspect many schools will really value is the fact that it is FREE. Go to www.teachyourmonstertoread.com to sign up.