Hellobee

Olive has had some developmental delays, and has been a reluctant reader to boot. So I was amazed a few months ago as I was reading her “The Monster At The End of this Book,” and she started reading the letters on the page for the first time ever: “S… H… H… H… H…”

I ran and got Bee from the other room, and Olive read us more and more letters… it turned out that she knew the entire alphabet, and we had absolutely no idea!

We give full credit for this to Endless Alphabet, an amazing app that she started using last fall.

1. Endless Alphabet

As you drag each letter, onto a word like “famished,” it makes a sound. For example, touching the F letter will cause the app to make the sound, “Fa fa fa fa fa fa” until you drag the letter onto the appropriate place on the word. Once you drag all the letters onto the word, they show a fun little animation and define the word.

The really remarkable thing about this app is how long and how consistently it keeps Olive absorbed. We will sometimes give her one of our iPhones during long stroller journeys, and she will gladly play the game for half an hour or more. I think the draw is two-fold: the interactive game itself is a lot of fun for her, and the animated cartoons also make her laugh. The combination keeps her really engaged, and so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that she learned her letters on this app!

The app currently costs $6.99 (they keep raising the price), but it’s worth every penny.

You can purchase Endless Alphabet for iphone here and Android here.

2. Endless Reader

The same app makers made another great app called Endless Reader. It starts off the same way as Endless Alphabet, where you drag letters to make a word. But then a little bird flies the word you just spelled into a sentence, and you get to drag a few words into the sentence.

While you drag each word, the app says the word out loud so that you can hear how the word sounds. The neat thing is that the words are very carefully chosen to be the most common words, so that your kid can recognize them on sight:

This app introduces “sight words”, the most commonly used words in school, library, and children’s books. Kids need to recognize these words by sight in order to achieve reading fluency. Recognizing sight words is advantageous for beginning readers because many of these words have unusual spellings, cannot be sounded out using phonics knowledge, and often cannot be represented using pictures.

Source: Endless Reader website

After you move the words into the sentence, a voice reads out the whole sentence and then an animation appears which demonstrates it. It’s a great and natural extension of Endless Alphabet, and I highly recommend it!

One note: the app itself is free, and in return you get 6 words (from a to f). But to unlock the rest of the alphabet (20 more words, from g to z), you need to pay $5 for Reader Pack 1. Future reader packs are $5 for 20+ words each, or you can buy bundles of them for $12. We actually bought every single reader pack, because if you don’t then your kids will pretty regularly hit something which triggers an in-app purchase and opens iTunes. Extremely annoying, but if you upgrade then the problem goes away.

Overall, we spent around $25-30 on in-app purchases for this app and consider it completely worth it. I suspect that learning all these sight words will make learning to read much easier for both of our kids. We’ll report back on that one later!

Endless Reader is currently only available for the iphone.

3. Endless Numbers

Endless Number applies the Endless Reader formula to learning numbers. Instead of word sentences, you get math sentences. So if you’re learning about the number 2, you’ll see a number sentence like this one:

The dragging of numbers and addition symbols is very intuitive, and Olive got it right away. There are a number of other little things in the app, all of which are designed to help your child understand numbers and counting.

Sometimes the app introduces concepts without fully explaining them. For example, when you get to the number 5, it introduces the concept of odd numbers by having you count only the odd numbers (1, 3, 5). Odd numbers are not really explained as far as I can tell, which is a bit confusing. But you don’t need to understand the concept in order to drag the numbers into the proper place.

They do something similar when they introduce the concept of grouping numbers by five. I found it all a little confusing – but Olive didn’t seem to find it confusing at all. It’s a good opportunity to review the trickier concepts with your kids in person.

There are 25 numbers you can choose from, and they use a similar model to Endless Reader: the first 5 are free, and the next 20 cost $4.99. Again, you kind of have to make the in-app purchase here if you’re going to use the app, otherwise your child will be constantly clicking the “buy” buttons and opening iTunes. But again, it’s totally worth it and all 25 numbers can be unlocked for $5. It’s a great value.

Endless Numbers is currently only available for the iphone.

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At this point, I’d buy pretty much any app that these guys put out. There are a lot of entertaining apps and a lot of educational apps, but not a lot of apps that are both entertaining and educational. These guys have pulled that off three times in a row, and I can’t recommend their apps highly enough!