By Christie Dwyer

Overall Impression

I knew Kindergarten Reading was going to be fun when my preschool aged daughter started clapping, cheering, and basically bouncing off the walls in excitement while playing the app. Ever since she got her hands on this app by Duck Duck Moose, she has been hooked. In Kindergarten Reading, preschool through Kindergarten aged students will love helping Milo the Meerkat and his sidekick Puffs at the zoo, feeding letters and words to flamingos, monkeys, lions, and dolphins.

This phonics game is based on the Common Core State Standards – Foundational Skills of Reading at Kindergarten. It contains nine different word and letter activities that help to reinforce letter sound recognition for consonants, short vowels, and also long vowels. Activities include feeding a dolphin the lowercase letter whose sound is verbally mentioned on the app, feeding monkeys pictures that start with a certain letter, or rearranging letters on flamingos to spell consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words. Each activity helps to practice on different letters and vowel sounds. There is room for 4 different players, three students and a guest. In the parent’s section, one can follow any of the three student’s progress with consonants and vowels.

The app has verbal instructions for each activity. I think the rewards system is what keeps bringing my daughter back over and over again. There are plenty of verbal and visual praises including monkeys spinning around as well as a monkey dancing. And as children finish the phonics activities, they earn animals to create their very own zoo- which comes with six different habitat scenes! And for each of the 43 levels completed in the app, the zoo unlocks a new animal to be able to put in the zoo. She definitely has built her own menagerie of animals in her zoo already! My daughter would miss things on occasion, basically for being so excited to feed the animals and add animals to her zoo, she didn’t bother to wait for the verbal instructions. So she is learning to slow down a bit.

Kindergarten Reading is very engaging with its music, narration, as well as graphics. This game is very fast paced and has very cute animations. You can tickle the animals. If you take a little while to answer, the animals can fall asleep on you. So the only reason to rethink whether this is the right app for your child is the fact that the app moves very quickly. There is a lot of visual stimulation for a preschool app, so if your child gets distracted or needs extra time, this may not be the best choice. But Duck Duck Moose, along with all their other fun apps, has created another great app to keep children very engaged!

Overall Rating: 5

Appy Ratings (Appy’s):

• Educational Value: 5
• Entertains/Engages User: 5
• Customization/Settings: 3 
• Value for the money: 5
• Ease of Navigation: 2 
• Quality of Graphics: 5
• Overall Rating: 5

Category:

•  Language Arts

Goals:

• Beginning Sounds
• Letters
• Phonics

Age Group:

• Pre-School (Age 4-5)

Overview

Developer Duck Duck Moose has created another very engaging app for preschool/Kindergarten aged children. Kindergarten Reading helps children practice with phonics in order to support their new and upcoming reading adventures! There are many different levels of activities within this app, so some may be more difficult for your child at first, but it will come before you know it, as they will likely come right back to the app for more!

Issues/Wishlist

• I would like to be able to return to the home page to track my child’s progress or switch to a different player without exiting the app altogether.
• This app can be very busy (in visuals as well as sounds.) Not all children learn the same way. So if Duck Duck Moose could offer an option (besides turning the sound off completely) to calm down the visual/sound stimulation, it might help kids who can become easily distracted or need a little extra time to think up answers.

Price and Download link

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