Teach your Monster to Read is probably the most notable video game that has been truly embraced and recommended by British primary schools, including our local primary when my son attended his very first school year, called Reception (in the UK Reception class begins at the age of 4 – don’t be mistaken, it is no longer a nursery, instead proper alphabet, reading, phonics etc. works are completed by the tiny students). Apparently, the game has been played approx. 250,000,000 times by kids all over the world* aiding millions of them to learn to read at a more efficient rate while having loads of fun.
Award Winning Game for a Reason
This game is a gem, deserving all the fantastic awards. For my subjective list, here are some top reasons for picking this game as an absolute ‘must play’, plus as a model to be followed in the gaming industry:
- Immersive story with lots of treasure hunt for letters – there is a natural flow in the sequence of events, which keeps the kids in the story, engaged at every step. The game story takes you through dozens of planets (each planet is a level focusing on a letter / sound family), which are grouped into galaxies.
- Cute monsters and lovely surroundings in a colourful but clean design – the visual elements of the design are superb eye candy, no clutter, just the right amount
- The kid is the teacher – how fantastic is that? Your just budding reader is an instant reading master! No more pressure on those tiny shoulders. They will feel a lift in their self-esteem gently guiding their monsters into the land of letters.
- Scaled Challenges – There is a superb academic team behind the tasks and texts – each word and utterance has rock solid research behind them. Your kid will see the most frequent short words. Does it sound too simple? While many video games with texts aimed at children are too complicated, lengthy, uninteresting, Teach Your Monster to Read has a systematically built vocabulary progression of the English language, which children need most to become confident readers. There are lots of carefully analysed statistics to lean on what letters, words are picked, how they are combined into phrases or sentences, how they are ordered in each part of the game, not to mention how they are still turned into an invisibly smooth story! There is a lot to appreciate with the ease of texts, even if it looks easy to concoct a child friendly story, it is far from easy. No wonder this is one of the most neglected areas by children’s game developers.
- Ease of Use – kids warm to the game quickly, and the game mechanics are pretty well set. The game includes some platform puzzles (most notably when kids need to hope along a route then jump onto the next right path at a junction. If you miss the route, you will not die, so there are no lives lost or health points to worry about, but you will need to go back on the path to pick the right vowel or consonant (combination) path.
- Sound Design – Lovely voice acting, sound effects (kids cheering!), enjoyable game music (Do you recall that moment when you took out the battery of an annoying music toy? Not here.)
- Speed – While some video games feel rushing and inducing lots of anxiety, Teach Your Monster to Read feels just right, neither too slow nor too fast, exciting to keep your little one curious but not too exciting to make them feel out of control on a roller coaster
- Pleasure and pride – Any time I have seen my kids playing the game they had pleasure and pride on their face. When finishing the game, they kept talking about it enthusiastically, like the tricky words they collected in their monster’s pocket, the ducks they herded in the pond called ‘n’ etc.
- No commercials or in-app purchases – Yes!
- Independent game on a touchscreen (or on a laptop / PC for more computer savvy kids who already have good mouse control) – Kids can play the game independently as most instructions are provided clearly by voiceover. That said, using a laptop / desktop PC you may need to help your little one along the way until they have some good control of controlling the cursor on the screen. This should not take a long time though. Please note that apps are not free for the game, only the laptop / desktop game versions are free of charge.
- Teacher’s feedback – Like me, teachers were pleased to see the kids improving their reading skills. My son started to enjoy reading more, picked more complicated books (fewer pictures, more texts), had an instant recognition of tricky words and made better observations about their own reading (including their self correcting qualities). He gradually went up and up in the levels of reading books.
- Tracking progress – You can easily check the progress your little one has made. Each time they log in they will have their very own statistics. Not only that, the monster wrote a letter to my son to say thank you! How cool is that?! A very polite monster indeed.
- Bedtime reading – Our cozy up bedtime readings gradually became more interactive and two-way. My little one started to read more and more sentences from the book – we were literally reading together, taking turns whose page it is, or which speaker we read.
- After 2 years – My kids want to play the game again. Two years after their first experience it is still a smashing positive memory (and my older one wondered again why is it only for young children…) The 6 and 10 year old are both confident readers but they said we want to play it again when I mentioned writing about Teach Your Monster to Read.
- Government approved – This was our first complex video game that has been approved by the UK government on a national level – yes, video games have made it this far in a couple of years finally. In a bit of a mouthful pedagogical language: the game complements Phases 2-5 of the UK Government-approved Letters and Sounds and further essential Systematic Synthetic Phonics programmes designed for primary school education.
Mouse Control vs Touchscreen Gaming
We played this absolutely brilliant – award winning – reading game with our 4 year old on a laptop back in 2019. It is free, even in 2021, all you need is an account, which you can open on the official game website. The app is not free, only the desktop / laptop version, which requires some mouse control skills from your little one. If your daughter / son is new to using a computer, you will be needed to let them safely learn to control the mouse / touchpad, etc.
In our game experience, while the software side (the series of tasks) was perfect, parental help was needed all the time with the hardware side of the game: at this stage our 4 year old had had no experience in using a laptop 🧑💻, and just at that time we had no working iPad. He simply had no grasp of how to use a touchpad, a mouse, what a cursor is, etc. so it was all new to him (we simply did not expect to have a 4 year old working on an expensive laptop, but school homework is work and compulsory), and sometimes he would get frustrated how to move the character in the right direction. We quickly realised that the laptop/ PC/ computer may not be the best platform for this game so we switched to a complete finger led interface (i.e. touchscreen) tablet / iPad, which worked far better to help him achieve independent use of the game (that is why in the Great Lockdown of 2020/ 21 we used / are using a touchscreen Chromebook for home learning, any touchscreen is highly recommended).
That said, even on a clumsy laptop, we loved every moment of gaming together: the development in literacy, the confidence in applying phonics was palpable, and so was the absolute attention to details, the utter immersion in a loveable monster world. Our kid was enjoying interactive learning in a fun and safe game, plus showing great progress – this is all we parents would want from a good educational video game, isn’t it? If you have the game on a tablet (in a shock absorbing case) maybe you can enjoy a bit more independence and sneak out for a few minutes to finish drying the clothes, scrubbing the pots and pans, or doing that urgent remote work which stay at home parents do ‘behind the screens’.
Pre-school / Kindergarten / Reception / Year 1 (Y1) Reading Game
At around age 4 or 5, your little one is ready to recognise and learn the forms of letters and associate them with sounds that change the meaning of words (phonemes – hence phonics). Within weeks you can see improvements – in our experience, not only English speaking kids but also bilingual ones can benefit from learning the letters and sounds, even if the associated sound may be pronounced differently (e.g. in our case the letter ‘s’ sounds ‘sh’ in our native Hungarian language, nevertheless, a few months or years apart they will learn to read the same letter in two different ways). The game design is appealing to girls and boys alike as the monsters are cute, cuddly and mischievous in any way. The themes include space, lava, etc. never talk down to kids, and are geared just at the right challenge (at least on touch screen, or on laptop if your child has practice with the hardware bits).
There are three games, First Steps (a 7-week absolute beginner programme), Fun With Words (a 14 week programme which builds on the previous step) and Champion Reader (a 22 week programme where kids – and monsters of course – practice reading short sentences!), which provide a playful introduction into the land of letters and the sea of stories. Many teachers suggest using the video game at home, and equally, many of them use the game in class (in IWB – interactive whiteboard – sessions, or letting the kids use the game at a school computer for 5-20 minute sessions).
Letters & Sounds – Adventure Series of Mini Games in 3 Chapters
Far from isolated mini games, Teach Your Monster to Read is a fully fledged adventure game with a fluent narrative: being in the stream of your very own monster story, where the kid is the master and guide of the monster pet, is an instant hit with 4-5-6 year old children. Ideal playtime is about 15-20 minutes on a daily basis. The texts are scaled to kids’ reading levels (unlike generic video games in the entertainment market), the designs are fun and friendly, and there is voiceover acting to make the instructions clear for a non-reading child user (again, unlike in case of many marketed video games).
- First Steps – Initially, kids will practice 31 letter-sound combinations: s, a, t, p, i, n, m, d, g, o, c, k, ck, e, u, r, h, b, f, ff, l, ll, ss, j, qu, v, w, x, y, z, zz. They will move onto 2-3 letter words, practising blending consonant – vowel – consonant words (CVC words), as well as segmenting the sounds in such words. All the super high frequency short words that are not read easily by beginner readers are included too, to make sure tricky words are practised right in the First Steps.
- Fun With Words – In the second game series, Fun With Words, kids will move onto letter combinations (ch, sh, th, ng, ai, ee, igh, oa, oo, ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ear, air, ure, er) and will teach their monsters to read longer words, not only CVC, but CVCC, CCV and CCVC words. They will also have a chance to gain confidence in reading so called non-decodable (‘tricky’) words (he, she, the, to, we, me, be, was, no, go, my, you, they, her, all, are, said, so, have, like, some, come, were, there, little, one, do when, out, what). In this series of mini video games, children will start to read sentences of a few words, e.g. “Get the cat” and chunkier ones such as “Can you get me an owl that is not green or red?”. That’s pretty amazing, isn’t it? The kid/monster duos will actually do read longer chain of sentences at this stage!
- Champion Reader – The third part of the game only works if your child is a confident user of the second part as this is the most advanced reading video game. If children are pushed into it too early, they might be put off, so make sure as a parent that your kid is ready to play it. Some sound and letter combinations may even get more complicated at this stage (not only reinforcing several two or three letter phonemes, like zz, ch, sh, th, ng, ai, ee, igh, oa, oo, ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ear, air, ure, er, but introducing alternative spellings of sounds (e.g. /ai/ as used in eight and they)). The important bit is that kids need to read sentences confidently from the beginning of this part of the game (e.g. ‘Go and get me a black bee for my jar,’ she said.). Champion Reader games give children extra practice for whichever phonics scheme they’re using in school: adding more tricky words, many more sentences with well designed stumbling stones where similar words appear with alternative pronunciations (e.g. fin vs. find). If you find that your little one needs more practice with reading, or simply more confidence with trickier words, they will surely enjoy this game at the age of 6, so year 1 students can enjoy this game too!
- Reading for Fun – At the time of writing (end of March 2021), I’ve just realised that there is a new chapter in beta testing version. Hopefully there will be even more games coming, yay! (why didn’t we get an invitation from the developers I wonder).
- Next Steps – the game has only three parts, but we would like to see a 4th, a 5th, etc. more of the literacy / reading games. Also, it would be nice to see the game coming onto classic console platforms, which are super commercial so could do with a bit of profile enchantment (Nintendo, Playstation, Xbox etc.) We would like to see more games that lead kids onwards, to the realms of grammar, (nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc.), punctuation, retelling stories, comprehension, composition, spelling etc. Our then 8 year old daughter also played through the game and was disappointed to learn that there is no continuation. Why is that? Why is it that the Teach your Monster to Read game has no further chapters through the more complicated literacy stages? (ssh, it seems there is, see the previous point, Video Game Mum!) It’s a great question. We assume they may have run out of money. But aren’t there millions of families who would use a low priced game of excellence? While the first three parts of the game are free to play with on a laptop (thank you Usborne!), and has been a HUGE SUCCESS, why is it that there are no more apps in this series, even if parents would very likely be happy to pay a small amount (as the app industry shows, parents spend lots of money on a good game). Why are there so few really good reading games? Video Game developers are welcome to comment, or even better, start working on filling in the gap. Parents, what are your recommendations?
Teach Your Monster to Read New Chapter 4 Reading for Fun
Game Developers
The reading game Teach your Monster to Read has been funded by the charity Usborne Foundation (founded by Peter Usborne MBE and his children, Nicola and Martin), several members of the game developer team have had decades of experience in creating digital content, including Antonio Gould, Jonathan Skuse and Berbank Green (Popleaf), and the academic team is on the marvellous mission to create digital games that develop children’s literacy, like Angela Colvert .
* might already exceed this number (source: the game developer’s official website Skuse
Compatibility of Game Platforms
- Laptop (free) – Windows, Apple Mac
- Desktop (free) – Windows, Apple Mac
- iPad (fee paying app)
- Amazon Kindle app (fee paying app)
- Android Tablets (fee paying app)
