Homeschool Crew Review: Reading Eggs

Back in 2012, I had an opportunity to review Reading Eggs with my then 6 year old son, Anthony.  He loved it!  My youngest child is now 6 years old and starting to learn to read, so I was excited to have another opportunity to use and review this fun, award winning, online reading program.

There are 3 different reading programs in the Reading Eggs Family.  Reading Eggs Junior is for children ages 2-4 years old. Reading Eggs is for 3-7 years old, and Reading Eggpress is for 7-13 years old.  They also offer a math program for 3-9 year olds called Math Seeds.  The Reading Eggs program takes beginning readers to a second grade level of reading.  Reading Eggs uses five keys to reading success: phonics, phonemic awareness, comprehension, and fluency to teach reading skills in a game like atmosphere.  As children complete activities, they earn eggs that can "buy" them different items in the game for their house or egg, or earn them playtime in the arcade.  A short placement  test will help determine where in the program your child needs to start.  Reading Eggs can be played on a computer with an internet browser, or on Apple devices with iOS 8 or newer or Android 4.1 Jelly Bean or later.

There are printable worksheets available to go along with the lessons.  They also just released a brand new set of program guides for homeschoolers that provides a 36 week learning sequence for language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies.  You can print out the schedule, start at the beginning of the program or find the lesson your child is on and read down the lesson plans for each subject.  For example in lesson 16 it shows the phonics lesson an , vocab words hand, stand, and dance , and book Sam Can Dance along with a poetry suggestion to read with your child, Old Woman in a Shoe.  The My Program books to for this lesson are Talking Tigers, A Man, A Face, and I Can.  The MathSeeds less is on the number eight and it lists teaching books as 6 to 10, Count to 10, 8 Legs, and Spiders.  The science topic is weather and the reading eggs library book is Hot Places and the junior library book is My First Weather.  The social studies topic is my area and the book from the Reading Eggs library is Our Indigenous People.

You can purchase Reading Eggs as a 6 month subscription for $49.95 or a one year subscription for $59.  They are offering a Free 4 Week Trial until November 30, 2017. 

Emmie (6) has been using Reading Eggs.  We started out using it on the computer, but I had to get her to the website and logged in before she could get started.  It was also hard for her to click and drag some of the things in the activities so I put the app on my iPad and she has been playing it on there ever since.  She can open the app and play Reading Eggs completely independently on the iPad. 

 After taking the placement test, Emmie started on lesson 11, which seemed to be a good spot for her.

When she clicks on the My Program it takes her to this page. 

From here she can click on her map to do her next lesson, or read one of the books on her shelf.  I really like the book feature.  They don't have to read them, but if they choose to and complete the quiz they earn more eggs.  There are fiction and nonfiction books on the shelf and as they complete more lessons they have different books to choose from.  The books can be read to them or they can read them themselves.

Once they go into the map and to the current lesson, there are 12-13 activities to complete for each lesson.  The activities are not the same for each lesson, there are a variety of interactive activities tat include things like clicking and dragging words to match the pictures, matching capital and lowercase letters, helping frogs to hop across lily pads by clicking on the correct word, putting words in the correct order to make a sentence, and many more.

Emmie loves Reading Eggs.  It is fun to play and has already helped improve her reading.  She loves all the interactive activities and the variety.  I like the books that they can read and that there is a mix of fiction and nonfiction.  I also like the worksheets that go along with the lessons.  You do not have to do them, but for those who have children (like Emmie) that enjoy worksheets or who want extra reinforcement of the lesson, it is a great option.

Anthony has been using Reading Eggpress.  The placement test started him at lesson 101.  It is similar to Reading Eggs in that there is a map with the different lessons and each lesson has a variety of activities. The activities in Reading Eggpress are more advanced with questions about things like parts of speech, dictionary questions, deciding what type of book it is by studying the cover, and comprehension questions.  Students still earn eggs for completing activities that can be used in their apartment or for their avatar.  They also collect trading cards.

Anthony does not think that Reading Eggspress is as much fun as Emmie thinks Reading Eggs is, but he doesn't complain about doing it and likes the reward cards that he can collect. I think it is a good program for children in that 7-13 year old age range to help develop their language arts and reading comprehension skills.  Lessons take around 30 minutes for Anthony to complete. 

To see what my Crew Mates had to say, stop by the Crew Blog!