When you open the app you are taken directly to the homepage, which features a big monster opening his mouth wide. Inside of his mouth are different sight words you can scroll through. In the bottom right hand corner there is a circular dial with the numbers 1,2, and 3 on it. These numbers represent the different levels of sight words. On the monsters top lip you will see the alphabet. Some of the letters are shaded a light color and others are darker. If they're darker that means you do not have those letters unlocked. When you pay for the upgrades you can have students practice multiple sight words for the entire alphabet.
To begin playing you select the first sight word in the list, which is all. When you select the word you first see the word written how it should be. Each letter of the alphabet is a different color. After the app says the word aloud a crowd of monsters runs through the word and the letters go flying on the page. The student then has to drag the colored letters back into the outlined word on the page. When they drag a letter it says its sound. If they don't put the letter in the right spot it makes a silly noise. If it is put in the correct spot it says the name of the letter. After the word is put back correctly, music is played and the word is read again.
Once the student spells the word correctly, a monster comes and drags the word above a sentence. Then the monsters run through the sentence like they did the words and multiple sight words in the sentence go flying. It is then up to the student to drag the correct sight words to their correct spot. If they want to hear the sentence read aloud they click on the speech bubble in the top left hand corner. When the student is dragging a word to the sentence, the word moves and keeps saying how it's pronounced.Each of the words also have unique patterns on them to help the student remember its definition. For example the word up, had cloud inside of it.
After the student has correctly placed the words into the sentence, an animated clip is shown. This clip has a monster acting out the sentence. After the clip, the app reads aloud the sentence. If the student wants to watch the clip and hear the sentence again, they click on the circular arrow which is on the monster. If the student feels ready to move on to the next sight word they click on the arrow in the bottom right hand corner. This will take them to the next sight word in the alphabet. If at anytime they need to go back to the home page they click on the banner in the top right hand corner that says abc.
For this lesson the focus was, I can practice spelling words by saying the word and listening to the sounds I hear. The common core standard that accompanied this lesson was, RF.1.2.D. The lesson began with us talking about things we can do to help us spell words we don't know. Immediately the student told me that we could sound out the words we are trying to spell. We have focused before on stopping and listening to the sounds, so I was very impressed that she remembered this from previous lessons. I then explained to her that listening to the sounds is helpful but sometimes words are tricky and have letters which are silent. We can't hear these letters so when we try to spell the word we may leave them out by accident. I told her that it is okay if that happens, because by listening to the sounds you will still be able to spell most of the word correctly.
When she opened the app she worked through all six unlocked sight words. I instructed her to spell the word on her own after the app read it aloud the first time. After that, she was spelling every word she was given. She did a good job with matching the misplaced letters to their correct spot. The student told me at the end that she enjoyed this app.
I would absolutely recommend this app to other teachers. The graphics, sounds, and content are all great. A pitfall however, is that the in app purchases are pretty expensive. If the teacher could somehow figure out how to find the funds to purchase this entire app, I truly believe it would be beneficial to those students who need practice with sight word recognition.
References:
[Untitled image of Endless Reader app]. Retrieved March 9, 2017, from http://www.hbook.com/2014/04/choosing-books/reviews/endless-reader-app-review/#_
[Untitled image of Endless Reader app home screen]. Retrieved March 9, 2017, from https://itunes.apple.com/us/app-bundle/endless-school-bundle!/id999169038?mt=8
[Untitled image of Endless Reader logo]. Retrieved March 9, 2017, from https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.originatorkids.EndlessReader
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