Get ready to read with, ahem, Ready to Read app
The Ready to Read app, by Danish developer Minitutor, has been a big hit in Scandinavia with children playing it for more than 50,000 hours so far. Now it’s been launched in the UK too.
Aimed at 4-8-year-old children, it focuses on early reading comprehension: letter shapes and sounds. The idea is that you use it at home with your child for 10 minutes or so a day, complementing the learning they’re doing at school.
Ready to Read helps children practise writing letters on the screen, while also offering “word pictures” for some of the most common English words, to aid recognition. It’s all based on lower-case letters too, to fit in with teaching at school.
Minitutor stresses that the app was developed with “expert teachers with years of experience”. And, of course, the app uses spoken instructions to ensure that children always know what to do – by definition, they’d probably be flummoxed by purely written instructions.
The design is simple, colorful and unfussy: easy to use and with minimum distractions from the core exercises. Although the aim is for you to use it alongside your children, you can provide extra encouragement as they work through it.
Ready to Read costs £2.49 for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store.
Check out our 100 Best iPad Apps of 2013 e-book – £1.99 from Apple’s iBooks Store
