Reading Kingdom (A REVIEW)

I love to find ways to make learning to read fun for my kiddos. I am on my last kid, who is age 7 and 1st grade. He reads pretty good, but he mostly remembers words and combinations. He can't really sound things out too well, and makes it up if he's not sure, so reading time involves mostly easy readers for him still. He needs any help he can get, so I was happy to try out an online program called Reading Kingdom.

Reading Kingdom is a unique online reading program in that it uses more than just one skill to teach reading. It combines sounds, writing, sequencing, meaning, grammar, and comprehension.

How it works:

The adult logs in for the child, and the child is guided through a series of exercises that have the child spell, find, read, build sentences, fill-in the blanks, type words, and click on matching words or letters. The child then comes to the end of a session and can continue onto another session or end the session for the day. I like that it has clear starting and stopping points. There are also fun little characters and pictures to engage the child as they are learning to read and spell the words.

Alex, age 7, working on Reading Kingdom

My son, of course, thinks he can read good enough, and was a little resistant from the start. He found the sessions to be too long, especially when he figured out how to tell how much he had to do. In the right hand corner of his screen it shows how many "parts" are in a session, and the top number goes up until it matches the bottom number and then the session is over. He would get discouraged when he would start a session and it said 1/29. That meant that he had 29 "things" to get through. I like that number as it helps me know how long he is going to be working on a session, but for him it wasn't a good thing. An average session for him, if he worked without complaining, was about 15-20 minutes.

Some days he really liked it, and he would get every part right. Other days he would get frustrated when he typed wrong and the program would tell him what to type, or highlight what he should click. It is nice that the program will guide the child if they don't know the answer, and tell them exactly what to do, but it is very sensitive. If he bumps a wrong key then it starts talking to him, and he didn't always like that.

Alex, age 7, working on Reading Kingdom

Reading Kingdom recommendeds that the child work on this 4 days per week, which means 4 "sessions" per week. I would have to agree with that. It is very repetitive and builds on what the child learned previously. My son forgot how to spell a word he learned if he went too far in between sessions. We tried to do the 4 per week, but ended up doing about about 3 per week.

Click over to Reading Kingdom to read some of the things they have to say about it there. You can also read other reviews for Reading Kingdom or ASD Reading from the other crew members.