Word Reading Apps

Word Reading Games That Guide Children to Complete Early Reading Mastery

ABC Reading Magic series word reading games are the next step after your child has mastered our letter sound series. 

Included are progressive skill-building games in skill levels that most other reading programs overlook: blending, segmenting, and reading. This time-tested and proven process utilizes phonics principles that help improve your children’s phonological processing ability, giving them strong foundations in reading.

Each app includes built-in lesson plans, voice choices, font style options, and letter color options.

Three Skill Levels at This Stage of Reading Development

Skill 1 – Blending

Blending is taking individual letter sounds and combining or blending them into a meaningful word. Blending could be called “auditory reading” or reading only with sounds and no letters. Blending can be a difficult skill to learn. However, the efforts are well worth the rewards. Patience and persistence will be needed to gain proficiency in blending. An example of blending is, turning the letter sounds /b/ + /e/ + /l/ +/t/ into the word “belt.”   Good working knowledge of blending is necessary to prepare your child for the more difficult but essential skill of segmenting.

Skill 2 – Segmenting

Segmenting is one of the most important skills children need for successful reading, spelling, and writing. Segmenting can be difficult to master, but our word reading games help build this skill in a fun way. One way to look at segmenting is to consider it auditory spelling, where words are “spelled”  by phonemes instead of by the names of the letters. An example of segmenting for the word “cat,” is “/c/ + /a/ + /t/”

The importance of segmenting and the segmenting feature of our apps cannot be understated. As a parent or teacher, if you don’t understand the concept of segmenting, please trust the process and realize that “The ability to segment is a powerful predictor of future reading success.” (Yopp, 1996)

Segmenting is a skill that is often not practiced or even known by most parents and many educators. “The best predictor of reading difficulty in kindergarten or first grade is the inability to segment words and syllables into constituent sound units (phonemic awareness).” (Lyon, 1995).

Segmenting is closely associated with spelling. Segmenting is taking a word and breaking it up into its sound parts. In segmenting, the sounds of letters (phonemes) are used, and not the letter names.

Skill 3 – Reading

Our reading word games should be used only after your child has gained proficiency with the essential skills of blending and segmenting. Our games are designed to encourage reading and discourage picture guessing. One way we do this is to keep the picture hidden until after the child reads the sentence. Hiding the picture ensures that the child focuses on reading the words instead of picture guessing.

Build Vocabulary

We wanted to give children lots of practice in building strong blending, segmenting, and reading skills. To accomplish this, we added a large variety of CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words for your child to practice. Many of these words are uncommon words. However, we figured it best to use these uncommon words rather than nonsense words, as many programs do. Use this as an added opportunity to expand your child’s vocabulary.