Sprout Words

What we love about Sprout Words

In this Sprout Words app review we'll be looking at how well Sprout Words can help your child to learn to read the most common English-language words. Readers should know these words so well that they do not need to decode them letter by letter but know them on sight, hence the descriptive name.  

Being an app of Australian origin, Sprout Words is designed to reflect the Australian education curriculum but this should not put off those with children following other curricula. The chosen sight words are pretty much consistent across the English speaking world. There are no international variations in spellings among them to complicate matters. Whatever the country in which your child is beginning to learn reading English, Sprout Words is relevant and useful.

The developers of Sprout Words have aimed the app at children aged 3 to 8 but the precise age at which it is most suitable will depend on the individual child. It is ideal for those at the very beginning of learning to read.

Is Sprout Words easy to use?

The Sprout Words app is a delightfully simple app to use. Parents and teachers set up the app for each child that they wish to use it. The play experience has no time limit and so parents and teachers will be pleased to see that they can use it to support children as they play it.  

Not that children are unable to use Sprout Words fully independently. They are guided by a lively group of voiceovers that explain and encourage. The speakers have noticeable accents from the app's home country of Australia but they are clear and should provide no obstacle to learning whatever the user's regional way of speaking.

The app's choice of two typefaces, one of which is designed to be easier to use for those who have some form of dyslexia, is a very useful feature. If your child is struggling with one typeface, try switching to the other.

Words are introduced by the app one at a time and children engage with each one in a variety of ways to build their familiarity with the word. They colour in the letters of the word, they trace them, they spell the word by selecting the letters, and they spot the word in a grid. 

These activities serve to introduce kids to the sight words of any given level. Once they have gone through them, children identify the words from a group as they are spoken. This forms both a practice and assessment exercise. Parents and teachers can use this to see which words a child has learned and how well they have recognised them.  

What Sprout Words can improve on

The data produced for assessing users is quite simple, at the time of review, being a list of the recognised words in green with those not recognised by the child in red. Ideally, future updates to this app will add a further identification marker as colour alone is not useful for those with limited colour vision.

How much does Sprout Words cost?

This app is available only as a single one-off purchase, at the moment. As there is no trial version, you should use this review and the app's information page and website to check if its teaching goals match your children's needs.

Is Sprout Words safe to use?

All of the content in Sprout Words is relevant to and suitable for its target age groups.  

The app is expected to be developed further which is great but, at the moment, it does seem to have gotten ahead of itself in some of its requirements. When Sprout Words has the planned-for admin website for monitoring children's performance, its requirement for parents to register an email and for the app to need continuous internet access will be understandable. At the moment the first, in particular, seems an unnecessary requirement albeit not one that harms the experience or introduces the children using it to anything unsuitable.

Overall rating of the app

As you can see in this Sprout Words app review, this is a great app to help children begin to learn to read. There is the potential to improve in a few areas but these should come with the expected growth of the app as the planned features are added to it. Even before then, Sprout Words comes highly recommended with 4 stars.