Saturday, March 31, 2012

Fabulous Reading Resource

A few weeks ago, I read a review of Reading Eggs on Mary's Homegrown Learners blog.  I was very intrigued by Mary's review and decided to sign us up for a free preview.  I have to say I am VERY impressed with this website.  I ended up purchasing a subscription so I can use it with both of my boys.  There are two main levels:  Reading Eggs for children from the pre-reading stage until about 2nd grade and Reading Eggspress for children from about 2nd grade through 6th grade.

What I like about this as a mom is that I find the activities to be challenging for all age levels.  I feel that each lesson includes many important components of reading instruction including phonics, sight words, vocabulary, and comprehension.  There is a placement test that your child can take to help you decide where they should start.  I felt that my youngest son tested a little low (i.e. the level they placed him in seemed too easy), so I emailed their help desk.  They replied very quickly and explained how I could go about moving him up.  Great customer service!!  I am also REALLY impressed with the difficulty level of the activities for my oldest son.  He reads well above his grade level; however, I sat with him as he did one of his first quizzes and could not believe the critical thinking skills he had to apply in order to answer correctly.

What my sons like about this program is that they receive "golden eggs" for completing their lessons.  These eggs can then be used like money to purchase items for their own little avatars.  They can customize the avatars and each avatar has its own house.  My youngest son (and actually my oldest son too) loves to buy new items for his "guy's" house.  He is actually learning a lot about budgeting because he has to decide if he has enough eggs and whether he should save or spend.  He has been know to do several lessons within as single day in order to accumulate more eggs to spend!!  I feel okay about it because I know he is learning a lot from the lessons.

In all, I highly recommend this program.  My sons are doing lessons from Reading Eggs/Reading Eggspress several times per week as part of their homeschool reading instruction.  Even if you don't homeschool, this would be a really great program to have your child use over the summer so they don't lose their skills.  They will have so much fun they won't even know they're learning.

3 comments:

  1. Going to check it out! Anything computer related my kids love! My 2nd grader and kinder love to play computer math bingo for math facts and cross word puzzles for reading and spelling. Thank you!

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  2. We love Reading Eggs! My five year old has really learned so much from it and seems to take the "instruction" a lot better through the game than he does from me. I love that it sends me progress reports as well. Thank you so much for all the resources you share, we are just beginning our homeschooling journey and I look forward to receiving your posts in my inbox!

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  3. We love Reading Eggs too. My son started doing the lessons around the beginning of April. He was five years and one month. Now 7th June, his reading age is five years and nine months, even though his actual age is five years and three months. Now that progress has been made in just about eight weeks.
    He absolutely loves doing the lessons in Reading Eggs, and his Dad and I have to limit him or else he would spend all day "playing" Reading Eggs!
    What I really like is that at the end of each section there is a quiz and if they get too many questions wrong they have to go back and do the lessons again. So if they pass the quiz you can be assured that they really have "got it!"

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