The Sight Word Adventure App Review
App Info
Price: $2.99
Overview
The Sight Word Adventure is a fun app that provides vital practice on high-frequency words that all young readers need to memorize. These very common words often do not follow phonics patterns, so memorizing them builds a lot of fluency.
Features include:
- 11 mini-games
- 320 words from grades K-3
- Customizable
- Multiple users
- Progress tracking
Quality
The Sight Word Adventure is a very high quality app. It is intuitive for children to use, it follows a proven high-quality curriculum, and it has all the features that make it very useful to parents and teachers with multiple students. The app developers have created a very useful and easy-to-use app that will benefit most emergent readers.
Education
The Sight Word Adventure uses proven methods to help young readers master the vital core sight words that help them become fluent readers. Sight words are also called high frequency words, and they are taught in every early reading program, though the order might vary a bit. The 320 words chosen for this program make up over 50% of all the words that even adult readers need to know, and readers who are able to memorize them so they can recognize the words with no hesitations or mistakes typically become fluent and read well in their later school years.
App developers have included an outstanding parent/teacher resource accessible from the protected parents’ area. The pdf-formated document explains in detail why sight words are so important to learn and tells the reasoning behind the order, the levels, the activities, and more. The document also includes clear directions for each activity, in case something is not clear to you or to your child.
Eleven mini-games encourage young readers to memorize the sight words through reading and writing them in a wide array of situations. This helps children generalize and commit the words to memory so that they recognize them in print and around their environment.
Entertainment
This app is well-designed to intrigue young learners from preschool through grade 3. The very first game to play is a hide-and-seek game where the main character hops off the screen and leads the user on a hunt. By tapping the various items in the screen, the player will eventually find the character and gain access to a new focus word. Taps on other places trigger interesting animations, so it’s fun just to look around.
After several words are collected in this manner, the player is allowed to work through first the reading games and then the writing games. The games are all quick and engaging, and it will take a while before children become bored with them. After all, what’s not to like about shooting things at balloons to pop them and playing whack-a-mole!
Value
This is a high-value app. With 320 words in its memory and the ability to customize for individual students, there are loads of possibilities to accommodate learners from preschool through third grade. Kids will have hours of fun while they master one of the most important foundations of reading.
Child Friendliness
This app is very child friendly. There is a protected parents’ area containing access to student records, student accounts, set the language and choose capital or lower case letters, and more. Parents and teachers can be assured that kids cannot access any of these controls or the protected links and email systems that should be used only by adults.
- Protected parent area (can contain external links & social media)
- NO external links
- NO social media
- NO in-app purchase
- NO 3rd party ads