Reading Eggs is a multi-award winning reading programme for 2-13 year-olds. Developed by a highly skilled team of teachers, writers and developers, Reading Eggs is highly engaging, self-paced and educationally sound. The programme uses five key elements, focusing on a core curriculum of phonics and phonemic awareness, sight words, vocabulary, comprehension, and reading for meaning. Reading Eggs has a highly impressive reputation. An amazing 91% of parents noticed a significant improvement in their child’s reading.
Over the last few weeks, we have been introducing Biggest to learning to read at home with Reading Eggs. This is partly in preparation for starting school. However, I also know he loves games and technology with rewards and repeated patterns. As the holidays are long and difficult for him, it is great to know that there are activities we can do to calm him while ensuring they benefit him in other ways. I had no real expectation or hope that Biggest’s reading would improve significantly while we used the programme.
My goodness, have we been pleasantly surprised. Reading Eggs been a godsend in terms of helping Biggest, who has autism, during the long disrupted months of the summer; he absolutely loves it. More than this, I can see a huge leap in his reading ability after just a few weeks.
A few days ago he read a whole sentence – on his own.
We could not recommend Reading Eggs more highly.
We are thrilled to be able to offer an amazing 5 WEEK FREE TRIAL for readers of Someone’s Mum. Simply click through and fill in your details to get started. You can read more about the benefits of the programme below.
Reading Eggs – Why is it so fabulous?
I could genuinely wax lyrical about this programme. The first thing that makes it so effective is that the lessons are the perfect size for retaining the attention of young minds. There are ten short activities. Some activities take only moments, others a few minutes and they are nicely broken up with other interactive elements.
You can see the lessons coming up in the bar on the left side. Sam the the Ant is your companion on this reading adventure and Biggest is a little bit besotted with him. He is extremely engaging, with a wacky sense of humour and musical talent. As you progress through each new sound, Sam sings songs and makes jokes. The songs alone make Biggest collapse into giggles and he has been desperate to get on to the next lesson to hear the next one.
As well as being highly enjoyable and entertaining for little ones, the programme also develops a huge range of skills. There is, as you would expect, a lot of phonics work. However, there is so much more beyond that. Reading Eggs say this:
“Reading Eggs builds active and engaged reading comprehension skills. The activities scaffold your child’s understanding with a wide range of pre-reading activities to ignite their thinking. They will progress from learning words and their meanings to reading for meaning, moving from learning to read to reading to learn.”
I wholeheartedly agree with this assessment. Yes, the basic building blocks of reading are taught, and your child will be supported in learning words and sounds by the programme. But, more importantly, Reading eggs builds up your child’s ability to engage in what they are reading with returning themes, humour and story-telling.
Reading Eggs does not just teach a child to read – it helps them learn to love reading.
Pros
As mentioned above, Reading Eggs is bite-sized, extremely engaging and based on solid research. I honestly do not think you will find a more effective app for helping your child to read while being genuinely entertained. I was flabbergasted to hear the yearly subscription price – just £39.95. Considering the sheer amount of lessons and resources you get (There are scores of extra activities from printable worksheets to dozens of extra reward games and interactive elements to play with) that is a true bargain. In addition, you get progress reports emailed directly to you and rewards certificates. Biggest was thrilled with his first one –
Cons
There are not many downsides to Reading Eggs – and some of them may be specifically related to our situation. Biggest has autism and his fine and gross motor skills are a fair bit behind his peers. He is not yet able to work a mouse and, even on a tablet, he finds tasks that require very fine movements, like clicking and dragging, very difficult. We do not have a touch screen compatible with Reading Eggs and he is unable to use the touch-pad or a separate mouse on our laptop. This meant I had to sit with him and get him to point at things he wanted me to do.
This worked perfectly well for most activities, but it did frustrate him a little. He was unable to complete the activities that involved tracing letters – though he did tell me which number to aim for next. It would be great to see an app version that worked on his Fire tablet. If he had been able to cope with the demands on his motor skills, I would have been able to let him complete some lessons independently.
The Verdict
I encourage anyone with children in the correct age ranges to give Reading Eggs a go. As part of the Back to School campaign, you can currently get five weeks free by clicking through from this site. There really is nothing to lose. In addition, if your child finds it as engaging as Biggest has, there is a real chance that it could be a hugely useful resource in developing and improving their reading skills. Reading Eggs gave us an extended free trial in order to get to grips with the programme. However, I want to reiterate this this is such a positive review because we have all been extremely impressed with everything about it. We will be continuing with our subscription after our free trial runs out.
Don’t forget to register for your five-week free trial here.
This post is in collaboration with Reading Eggs. Also, we received a free trial of the programme for the purposes of this review.