Teach Your Monster to Read

What is Teach Your Monster to Read?

Teach Your Monster to Read is an award-winning series of games that’s helped millions of children learn to read. It covers the first two years of reading, from matching letters and sounds to enjoying books. Teach your Monster to Read is widely used in preschool, primary school, kindergarten and first grade as an interactive teaching resource. Parents have seen significant improvements in their children’s literacy within weeks. 

Teach Your Monster to Read helps develop cognitive and critical, and communication skills as well as promotes thinking and reasoning and self-direction. It is great to use at home as an additional resource.

If parents purchase the app and create a free account online, kids can play under their unique usernames online or with the app interchangeably. 

Is Teach Your Monster to Read Free?

Teach Your Monster to Read is completely free to play on desktop and laptop computers. The web-based version for computers is free and contains all 3 Teach Your Monster to Read games.

How much does Teach Your monster to Read cost?

Teach your Monster to Read costs $5.99 to play on iOS and Android devices. Additionally, there are no in-app purchases, hidden costs or in-game adverts.

Is Teach Your Monster to Read easy to use?

Teach Your Monster to Read is quite user friendly. Upon opening the application, the user is shown a home screen with ‘Settings’ in the top right, ‘info for teachers’ in the bottom right and a ‘Log in’ for a new player.

The ‘Settings’ menu is parental lock protected and gives you a number of options such as music on/off, School Mode and further information about the app. There is also an option to set a magic number which helps when setting the application up in a school classroom situation.

Once a new player has been created they are given the option of three game play modes.

The first steps are for children just starting to learn letters and sound, Fun with words is for children who are confident and early letter-sound combinations and are starting to read sentences and Champion reader is for children who are confidently reading short sentences and know all of the basic letter sounds combinations.

Teach Your Monster to Read Features

Once a game mode has been chosen the child gets to create their own monster. We really like the idea of this section, as the child can personalise their learning. Once ready, the monster will board his spaceship and take off to the galaxies. Unfortunately, there’s his spaceship crash lands on a magical planet.

The Island King promises to help fix the spaceship as long as you help him reclaim his missing letters which means kids need to teach their monster how to read. To do so you must play various mini games. The King will reward you for every letter collected. If they can find all of his letters, he will fix one part of the spaceship and take them to a neighbour island king who can help them fix the other parts.

There are eight islands in this game. On each island, you must find up to four graphemes. For example, the first island consists of s, a, t, and p, and the last island consists of x, y, z, and zz. The game includes 31 graphemes of English words, including ck, ff, ll, ss, and qu.

To unlock each letter, you must play one of the following five activities. As soon as they have unlocked the activities, they can choose any one they prefer to claim the letter.

• Sheep: Listen to the phonics sound, and gather the sheep together in the right pen.
• Build: Listen to the sound, and pick up the right block to build the spaceship.
• Run: A mini endless running game where you choose the correct path based on the sound you hear as you hit the giant flowers.
• Factory: Suck up the right letters as they pass through the assembly line based on the sound heard.
• Climb: Climb the windows of a multi story apartment while building a CVC (Consonant-Vocal-Consonant) word based on the hint provided.

The Fun with words section of this reading and phonics app is an adventure game that takes your monster through a magical kingdom with various challenges and games including sounds such as ch, sh, zz, ay, ck and simple word construction such as cat, jam and chick.

Is it good for learning?

The Champion Reader for Children section guides the monster through a series of challenges including advanced phonics such as ay, oh, letter recognition, sounds, word construction, and instructions. Once again here the games are slightly repetitive (although slightly harder) but presented in a different story scenario.

We like the fact that the more advanced section of the game moves faster than the earlier sections to match the child’s ability to think and reason. We like the fact that the games build on each other and provide a logical, fun way for children to improve their skills. Parents and teachers, please be aware that the games do not always explain exactly what needs to happen, so users may need some support.

We loved the quirky graphics and the games are great fun to play. The developers can be congratulated on the graphical appearance of the monsters, the sound, and the rewards that you can achieve after each game is complete, the reward can also be chosen first which is good for motivation and classroom competition. However, we did not there was a vast amount of repetition. We also found that the game was quite slow in places and a little unresponsive.

The game itself takes fairly long to rebuild the spaceship. Once they have completed your monster reading journey, it will offer to restart the game. The developers also provide online support and a developer’s blog which provides ideas about teaching phonics at home.

We applaud the publisher for the high-quality content and rich features. It is a great way for children to learn phonics in a fun way and offers a vast number of letters and games which makes it real value for money.

Final Verdict - Teach Your Monster to Read

Teach Your Monster to Read is beautifully made, colorful and lovely illustrations can definitely attract children's attention, and the level of fun is very high. Teach Your Monster to Read covers almost all the learning elements of natural pronunciation, except for writing letters.

Teach Your Monster to Read comes highly recommended by the Educational App Store and we believe that Teach Your Monster to Read is one of the best phonics apps available.

There are other apps available that are part of the Usborne Foundation such as:

• Teacher Monster: Number Skills
• Teach Monster: Reading for Fun
• Adventurous Eating