5 apps to teach English to your kids — Part 2

Last week I wrote about the Phonics Match app to learn the individual English sounds (phonemes) and promised that in the next five weeks I will show you my favorite apps for teaching children how to write and read in English.

Quick reminder: all the apps I select use the phonemes (sounds) of the English language: they don’t teach the classic “aee, bee, see, dee”, but the sound that the letter makes in the word. Without the “ee” part, basically: when spelling “cat”, we don’t say “sii-aee-tee”, but “k-a-t”. The Jolly Phonics method is the fastest and most effective way to teach reading and writing in English.

Little Big Car Factory by Little Big Thinkers

Age: 6-8 officially (I use with 4 year-olds too :-)Price: $1.99

At Little Big Thinkers they know children and work well: their apps are very intuitive, colorful and a lot of fun.

In Little Big Car Factory, the goal is to build a car—different each time—to race with: you can choose the model, color, decorations (lots of cool stickers!) and even the sound system! The more you play, the more prices you earn: new cars (a fire truck, a sport car, the Batmobile…), new stickers, new paint (leopard, safari, underwater…).

Don’t let the name fool you, though, because Car Factory is not just a game. It’s an app to learn how to spell English words. Each child has their own account, and each account can have multiple  word lists (with up to 24 words per list).

When practicing a list, the words appear one by one, and children must spell them by ordering the letters correctly to win three cups for each word. But it gets harder: to achieve the Master level, in fact, they have to write the word on the keyboard with no clue — it’s also a great way to teach the order of letters on the QWERTY keyboard.

The best part for you parents? It’s you who creates the lists (the app does come with 12 built-in lists to use right away, though)! If your child is studying colors, why not creating a list of colors and study while playing? If they study Jolly Phonics, you can do what I do and create a list for each group of sounds or Tricky Words.

In school you children will learn the spelling, but learning while having this much fun, well, that’s a different story!

🌸 If you don’t want to miss the other apps, write your email here and I’ll send them to you!

You might also like:Phonics Match — an app to learn all the individual English phonemes