Bob Books #1 - Reading Magic

Bob Books has absolutely been instrumental in teaching my son how to read. At four years old he is blowing away friends and family with his accuracy and excitement. He enjoys the books and the app.

We have the Bob series of paperback books for our 3-1/2 year old daughter and thought this app would be a good accelerator to add to the mix. It does a good job of staying true to the book's simple structure and repetitive approach of showing kids reading pattens. However the structure of the app itself is the slight hindrance in our experience: The app is structured into 4 levels, effectively a progression through the concepts at different difficulty levels. In the first level kids are expected to spell out simple words (like Sam, cat, etc.) by moving tiles onto letter spaces in any order you want (i.e. placing "m" at the end of "Sam" - then "S" - in any order you want). But because the app doesn't have a well designed progression model, we found our daughter would jump ahead too easily and effectively survive with a "trial & error" approach. The harder levels are the same as described above, however you have to do them in logical order. There is such little difference in the experience that to our daughter it just seemed like the app wasn't working when she tried to place the last letter at the end of a word and it would jump away from the answer spaces. Often times I couldn't tell why it was doing that until I looked deeper into the structure of the app. So in the end, she would resort to just trial and error until she got through it which makes me think she isn't learning as effectively as could be done with better direction or expiation by the app. For a better example of an app with better progressive design, we found Reading Raven apps to be a little better.