Learning to read

I often talk about reading on this blog.  I love reading and it has played such an important role in my life that I have always wanted to impart that love and respect for reading on to my children,  My eldest son is an avid reader and I have no doubt that it contributed to his outstanding A Level English result earlier this year.  With the younger children, I have tried engaging their love of technology by buying the boys a Kindle and certainly with R who is ten, it has done the trick and he has read more books in the last six months than he had done in the previous year.  With L, he dips in and out but generally favours non-fiction to fiction and I don’t mind as long as he is reading something.

A started school in September and we are starting the process for the final time.  She has always loved being read to and loves her bedtime snuggle and story.  She is fascinated by letters and is very proud of the fact that she can now sing the ABC song all the way through.  She practises writing the letters that she knows and loves to spot letters she recognises.

We are speeding through the early reading stages but she is at that slightly frustrating stage (for her and me) where she can recognise the majority of the letters in the words but can’t quite blend them together to work out what the word is.  She is a clever cookie and some of the big frequency words like ‘the’, ‘is’, ‘it’ and ‘in’ are there already and she does try hard with the other words.

The frustration comes from her trying to guess what the word is rather than sounding out the letters to work it out.  There are very few words in her reading books and she will often come out with something completely random and it makes us both laugh. Other times, she just gets cross and refuses to carry on. The worst thing however is that if she gets one single word wrong, she has to start the whole books again.  These books aren’t very long but if they are restarted after every page, I feel as though Biff, Chip, Kipper and Floppy are becoming part of the family.

It is very early days and I know that once she gets it, she will fly and I hope that I can instil the love of books into her as I have with all of the others.  She loves the Biff and Chip books and I must admit that they are a bit like old friends, we have certainly had a fair few of their books pass through the house over the years.  I am trying to encourage her reading gently and she likes to be able to recognise letters in different books or on the computer.  The iPad has been great too as even before she started school, she had a number of apps that helped her to recognise and trace the letters.

We have been trying out the Read with Biff, Chip & Kipper app over the last couple of weeks and I knew as soon as I saw it that A would love it.  She already knows the characters of course and was keen to open the app and get started.

Developed by Gazoob and available on iPhone and iPad, Android and Windows, the Read with Biff, Chip and Kipper: Library is a free interactive reading app that comes with two free books to get you started and you can buy extra books to add to the collection when you need to.  The Apps can also be downloaded in individual levels with each level containing 4 reading books and 4 phonics books, or levels 1- 3 or 1 – 6 ( these are all paid for apps).

We have the level 1 – 3 app and that includes 8 books in each level and you can choose a book from the bookshelf to read.  Once you open your book, there is a ‘Tips for Reading Together’ page and a list of the useful common words in that book.  The books are completely interactive and you can then choose to read the book by yourself or have the book read to you.

You then read or listen to the story of the funny antics of Biff, Chip, Kipper and Floppy.  A loves the different books but her favourite so far is Kipper’s Alphabet I Spy where she has to match the letters with the things beginning with the letter and then trace the letter at the end which is brilliant to help her with phonics and letter recognition.

At the end of each book, there are activities related to the book or questions that the children can answer to show that they have listened to the story.

I think A’s love of this app speaks for itself. A’s favourite time to use the app is in the morning when we are in the car waiting for school to start. She will happily spend ten minutes looking at the books in the app and doing the activities and then declares that she is now ready for school.  It is engaging and fun and very well thought out.  As it includes the Oxford Reading Tree characters, it also reinforces what is being learnt in school as well as offering familiar characters and stories that children will like.  I am very impressed with the app and I know that I can add more levels to the library when A is ready too which I will definitely do.

We were given this download for the purpose of the review.  Any opinions are our own.