I’m wondering if anyone has had good experiences with apps that boost reading skills for the 1st-2nd grade year range. I have a boy who excels in math but struggles to read. It hasn’t helped that his mother has tried a strict rote-learning regime that sometimes leaves him in tears, leaving him frustrated and embarrassed. I tried flash cards, but he gets bored quickly. He loves for us to read for him, but he’s very timid about reading himself.
tl;dr I’m trying to figure out a fun way to build reading confidence for a 2nd grader, hoping maybe someone has road-tested a useful app.
How about you or his mom sit with him EVERY DAY and read to him while he follows along in the book? That will be fun and build confidence. My mother read a bedtime story to me for years and I learned to love reading. To this day, I love being read to.
I had the same problem with my daughter when she was in second grade, and never did find any computer-aided solution, so we made it a point to read a bit every night. Picking the right books was important - apparently we share a preference for the humorous and ridiculous - and sharing the work helped too. I’d read the right side pages and she’d read the left ones. We started this with Louis Sachar’s Wayside School series.
She just finished third grade, reads on her own now and seems to be all caught up.
They might skew a little young for you, but my son enjoyed and spent a lot of time with Endless Reader and Endless Wordplay. If you’re doing flash cards and stuff, you might find them helpful. They offer a “free” version with 6-10 words and the entire package is around $30 and takes up a couple gigs of device storage. I usually balk at $30 for an app but, hey, I’ve paid that much and more for a video game so why not pay it for my kid to learn to read? Anyway, you can see the included videos on the website and try to free versions and see if they’d work for you.
Although it’s not technically “educational”, I’m also a big fan of my kid playing Scribblenauts. As Tycho from Penny Arcade puts it:
At its core, Scribbelnauts is about using the written word to create things and finding the right words for what you need to create to solve the puzzle. Doesn’t get more educational than that.
Thanks for this… it sounds fun and effective. Unfortunately I don’t see it for Android/MacOSX, I should have mentioned those limitations. Maybe I’ll drag out an old PC laptop just for this purpose.
From the looks of it, Unlimited has much more content out of the gate whereas Remix is microtransaction based.
Another fun game is Letter Quest, where you control a cute Grim Reaper guy making his way through dungeons and defeating monsters by spelling words with Scrabble-like tiles. It may be a little much for your son right now if he has limited vocabulary and spelling skills but might be good for the future. Or, heck, let him try it now and see how far he gets – sometimes they surprise you when they get motivated by something.