Parents' Guide to Joy of Reading - learn to read

These phonics-based games give kids lots of systematic practice identifying the individual sounds in words. In the majority of the Joy of Reading - Learn to read games, kids do some variation of matching a sound to its corresponding letter. But the context around the games changes enough that kids might not notice that they're essentially doing the same thing over and over again. While the word builder always follows a set pattern of phonics exploration, additional games focus on other important early reading tasks and also add some more variety to what kids do in the app. There are a few small design aspects that seem to have been overlooked. For example, midway through the tracing game, kids need to "select the capital letter" without any previous mention or explanation of what a capital letter is. Or, kids earn coins at the end of each game, but there isn't any indication of what those coins do or how many kids have collected. It's also not entirely clear why Joy of Reading - Learn to read requires a subscription rather than a one time purchase fee. But, the subscription does give access to two apps, so families may find it worth the cost.