‘Teach Your Monster to Read’ is an award-winning phonics and reading game set in the fictional world of a monster that travels through space. ‘Teach Your Monster to Read’ is designed to support your child’s learning and reinforce any systematic phonics scheme that your child is using at school during their first years of learning to read. The game is available on Google Play and iTunes as a PC program (free) or an app ($4.99).

The computer program and app are comprised of 3 stages:

  • Game 1, ‘First Steps’, is aimed at pre-kindergarten. The game targets the beginning stage of phonics learning, where children have just begun to learn the relationship between letters and sounds by introducing 31 letter-sounds, along with blending and segmenting the practice of CVC words (words that are made up of the consonant-vowel-consonant pattern, such as ‘cat’, ‘mat’, ‘peg’ etc.). ‘First Steps’ also introduces 6 non-decodable ‘tricky’ words.
  • Game 2, ‘Fun with Words’, is aimed at pre-kindergarten children who are confident with basic sound-letter relationships. It introduces diagraphs and trigraphs (two/three letters that make one sound), such as ‘oa’, ‘er’, ‘igh’. ‘Fun with Words’ introduces a reading comprehension component that asks children to read decodable sentences and captions, which gives them clues on how to progress through the game.
  • Game 3, ‘Champion Reader’, is aimed at children in upper kindergarten to year 1. It is the most advanced of the three games. By this stage, your child should have a solid understanding of the phonemes – s, a, t, p, i, n, m, d, g, o, c, k, ck, e, u, r, h, b, f, ff, l, ll, ss, j, qu, v, w, x, y, z, zz, ch, sh, th, ng, ai, ee, igh, oa, oo, ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ear, air, ure, er. ‘Champion Reader’ focuses on reading comprehensions using sentences, rhymes, and short stories.  The game includes activities that require children to read and follow instructions in order to navigate their way through the game and pick up extra rewards. These activities become more challenging as the game progresses. ‘Champion Reader’ also tackles alternative spellings and ‘trickier’ words from education experts. Most importantly, it is based on the principle that an engaged child is a motivated child. It provides a fun, imaginative and engaging way for children to practice their phonics skills!

‘Teach Your Monster to Read’ runs on any normal laptop or desktop computer (including Apple Macs) and the app works on iPhone, iPad, Android and Kindle tablets (no VPN needed).