Endless Reader

When my daughter was 2.5 I saw a very positive review for the app Endless Alphabet in a child development magazine. I am in the tech field myself but decided to limit my child's access to smart devices from the start so she had zero "smart" screen time before that. She could recite the alphabet and identify most letters already, but there was no captivation on her part with letters at the time. I downloaded that first free app in the Endless (Alpahabet) series and she took to it immediately.The animations were adorable and clever, and they employed great pneumonics for the vocabulary words. She played with it for about 3 or 4 15- minute sessions a week. I was surprised at the vocabulary she picked up from it and assumed that was the main benefit. Pleased with the progress, I decided to try Endless Reader after reading somewhere that preschool was a good time to try to start introducing sight words. It was shocking how much she loved it from the start! We bought the first word pack series and she was WILD about it. We began doing it together - with me watching with her - for a short session each day (15 min). She asked every day for a session, and before we knew it she'd gone through the whole word set. I had thought it would be most useful for learning her lower-case letters. I was wrong! About a month into Endless Reader, I thought I'd test gently while we were working on a sentence to see if she could identify some lower-case letters. She surprised me by reading off several whole words that I pointed to (in any order!). I tried again with other sentences because I thought maybe she'd memorized a particular word/phrase order, but she demonstrated this over and over. My husband and I were astonished. We tried pointing out words in other books, menus, etc., we knew had been covered in the app ... and she COULD READ THEM. She asked to use the program each day and we obliged. We bought the second reader pack (Level 2) at her request after it was clear she was very familiar with the first. This second reader pack is for older kids (approx. 1st-2nd grade). That combo of Level 1 and 2 words has been magic. It's six months later and she can read over 200 sight words. Just amazing! And she still hasn't tired of the app. She's 3.5 now. We've turned other friends onto this and their children in the same age group have seen similar results. For those who are worried about the phonetic issue, I disagree. I've seen it in action with multiple 3-yr-olds now. Not only are the kids learning the sight words enthusiastically, but they're loving LEARNING. Now my daughter also sometimes enjoys playing with next app in the series, Endless Wordplay, but her favorite is still Endless Reader. It's still the only smart device app group she has been exposed to so I can say for sure that this early reading ability has come almost exclusively from her Endless Reader exposure. Some people have balked at the pricing, but each word pack is only $4.99-$5.99. Reader Pack 1 (for pre-K through kindergarten words) would have more than sufficed for us, but my daughter was SO enthusiastic about learning that she convinced to get Reader Pack 2 (1st-2nd grade) as well. I cannot tell you how well worth the investment my husband and I consider that to be for the hours of entertainment and education it's provided our child.