Tiny Readers

Learn to read at home and at your own pace.

Tiny Readers is designed to teach children how to read. Parents are encouraged to work with the children as they move through each section. Use this time to bond with the children and also supervise their learning. This is not a game so the children may not go through the lessons when unsupervised.

All features are available locally to the device so no internet is needed to use and learn with the app.

Children will first learn the letter sounds. They will then learn about vowels and consonants. Tiny Readers then introduces them to the concept of letters having multiple sounds. This is useful because in English one letter can have multiple sounds and it is important for the children to understand that as early as possible. They will then learn how to blend letters together to make a single sound. We then introduce them to the concept of common blends. This is where letters are blended together but they do not make the regular sound if they were to be pronounced letter by letter (e.g. ch and ph).

The children are then introduced to some rules that they should learn by heart. These rules are found in many words and will significantly affect the way they form new words. We encourage you to spend a lot of time in this section in order for the children to learn the rules by heart. A child who knows these rules is significantly more likely to be able to form new words when they come across them. Spend time on this section.

After completing Learning Tricks (Rules), the children can then move on to Full Words. This is a list of words that will test and reinforce their knowledge. The list captures many of the words some call sight words. This section will introduce them to many words that will impact their ability to read later on. The children should be allowed to get very familiar with these words so that when they begin reading, they have a large vocabulary to draw from.

The final two sections give the children a chance to start reading. The first section contains two poems and three short stories. The poems use short sentences to help the children connect the words together when reading. This seeks to improve their fluency. A fluent reader strings/connects words together when reading to the extent that there does not seem to be a break between the words. While a non fluent reader will read the words one at a time (e.g. The.......boy.......is.....going.....to.....the......bus......park. Here the reading is slow because they are reading the words by pronouncing letter by letter or they are focusing on one word too much. Lets call this reader the Slow Reader) or in a robotic way (e.g The.boy.is.going.to.the.bus.park. Here they may be calling the words fast but the pause can still be heard.).

It will take time to get the children to the stage where they are able to read. This is not an overnight fix. Let them go through each section slowly and repeatedly. Do not move on until you are confident they have learnt the full concept/content from each lesson. For example, after going through the letters sounds section, you can start asking the child what sound each letter makes. When they can correctly make the sound of each letter then you can move on. Each section builds on top of the knowledge gained from previous sections. Do not skip a section until mastery as been attained.

To help with blending, the parent can make the sounds of letters in a word and ask the child what the word is. For example, they can sound out the letter from rat as in /r/ /a/ /t/. Then ask the child what the word is. This will help with the hearing of the sounds and help them blend them together as well. Short to medium length words work here (Rat, sat, bat, ball, change, some, meat, meal, help, blend, well, stage, robotic and so on).