Spelfabet

Top early literacy apps 2014

9 Replies

I’ve spent far too much of the last couple of long weekends searching for, and trying out, new iPad apps for teaching early reading and spelling.

Every time I do this, I feel very sorry for parents doing the same thing.

There were 1729 search results on the word “phonics”, 7,960 on “reading” and 2634 results on “spelling”. Where to start?! Even an opinionated person who knows what she’s looking for gets a bit overwhelmed.

There are few really good early literacy apps

Most early literacy apps are frankly dross, IMHO. I wouldn’t want any kids I know to use them.

A lot of expert reviewers also seem to recommend apps that make me scratch my head, and wonder whether they really work with reading/spelling beginners, or understand our spelling system.

I ended up deleting most of what I downloaded, because most of them looked better in the store than they were when I tried them, and some looked downright confusing and possibly harmful to children’s learning.

However, there were quite a few nice ones I hadn’t seen before. Some of them are fairly teddy-bearish and really only suitable for ages 4-7, but lots of them can also be used with older, low-progress learners too.

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Handwriting

3 Replies

I recently met a smart, motivated child who is struggling with written work. His teacher reports problems with sounding out, sound-letter relationships and handwriting.

He's been gettings specialist help with handwriting, so to tackle sounds and letters, we started on my Level 1 workbook. The first four pages involve listening to 12 little words (ad, at, dad, pop, tap, pod, dot, pot, top, pat, tot and pad) illustrated by line drawings, and completing the labels on the drawings using three consonant letters (d, p, t) and two vowel letters (a, o). This is done in four stages: first sounds, last sounds, middle sounds then writing the 12 whole words.

So it's not difficult, and even quite confused Grade 1 children can usually quickly write all twelve words correctly, with a bit of encouragement and help.

Then I give them an enormous tick, four stickers and a big hooray, tell them they are extremely clever, and if the parents speak English, I grab one of them at school pickup time, get the child to demonstrate their brilliance at the workbook, practice doing a few pages together, and get them to agree to take the book home and finish it (having a large caseload really fine-tunes one's efficient-farming-out-work skills).

What's important in letter formation?

However, yesterday's smart, motivated child wasn't happy with my workbook's font, especially the letter "p".

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