Leave a Review READING MAGIC 2 Deluxe
Consonant Blend Helper
This app focuses on words that use consonant blends. The app uses about 300 words broken down into 23 categories. This app is all about showing how words are made up of sounds. This app shows how to construct words from sounds and how to deconstruct words into sounds. This app has three different reading games as advertised. The first game involves, what reading experts call blending. Children take separate individual sounds and blend them together into a single word. The second game is what reading experts call segmenting. Children take a word and break it down into its individual separate sounds. The third game is a straightforward reading activity. For both the reading and the blending games, the picture is hidden, which I really like. In my years of working with children on beginning reading skills, I have seen children relying a lot on picture guessing. This app helps children practice the basic reading skills with the pictures being used to help the children check their work, rather than distracting them into picture guessing. I like how the pictures will say what word they are when touched. This eliminates any confusion as to what the word is. This app has had an update to its interface since I first used it. The interface is nice and friendly. This app has helped my children build their word reading skills. It has helped them to understand the concept of consonant blends.Show lessMisleading
I was looking for an app to help my child with blends. All this app does is provide practice for individual sounds. For a child that already knows the sounds that letters make, this does help with blends. Also, the three sections of this app are all the same, despite being its own "category"--click the square, it makes a letter sound. I am mostly annoyed because I paid money for this. This app is not sophisticated enough to have to pay for it.Show lessDeveloper Response
The instructions and directions for the app have been upgraded to avoid misunderstandings about what this app is trying to teach. Sounds are the building blocks of words. This app teaches children how to recognize the individual sounds within words and how to put them together to make words. This app focuses on blends. In reality, consonant blends are not actually blends but two sounds put together. Teaching a child lists of the "st" words is ineffective on several accounts. The biggest reason is that these two letters together make no unique nor different sounds. Teaching words with "sh" is different because these two letters together make a unique sound. Secondly, most of these lists introduce advanced spellings beyond the scope of the list lesson. For "st" words, state, star, stapler, and stay all are more advanced concepts than the blend "st" that they are learning. This app has three separate sections. The first section focuses on blending. The second section focuses on segmenting. The third section focuses on reading. These are the key steps to reading mastery. This app is simple in its delivery of advanced concepts that have been proven to help children become excellent readers.Good
It's a good app for kids, I think it can be very useful, but it needs a better interface. It's very interactive.