Homeschooling Help with Reading Eggs (Free Trial)

AD – This post is in collaboration with Reading Eggs 

Well here we go again…Lockdown 3.0. Like many parents across the UK, I am now working from home whilst simultaneously attempting to home educate two young children. It’s pretty relentless and I will be honest, there have been a few tears already (mostly mine!!). Both of the girls’ schools have been absolutely fantastic, setting lots of schoolwork and hosting live online lessons during the day, however with two children aged 4 and 7 it often means my attention has to be split between my own work and homeschooling, actively helping them with the work that has been set for completion. At times, whilst juggling work teams meetings and conference calls, work deadlines and urgent priorities, it feels almost impossible to support their learning (causing Mum guilt to arrive by the bucket load!)

This is where Reading Eggs can be a huge help for us parents. If you haven’t already heard of it, Reading Eggs is an educational app for children that feels more like play than traditional learning and can be used fairly independently with ages 2-13. A multi stage app, Reading Eggs has four different sections based on your children’s age including Reading Eggs Junior (ages 2-4) Reading Eggs (ages 3-7), Fast Phonics (ages 5-10) and Reading Eggspress (7-13).

We have used Reading Eggs as a family for over 4 years now and I can honestly say with confidence that the Reading Eggs programme has helped my eldest daughter in particular, improve in terms of her reading ability and confidence.

With so many of us now juggling work and home schooling, I thought it would be useful to highlight what you can expect in each ‘stage’ of Reading Eggs to help you can choose what is best for your child.

Read on to learn about how Reading Eggs can help (whether they’re a preschooler, infant, junior or even early seniors) and sign up for a FREE 30 day trial of reading eggs here – https://readingeggs.co.uk/realmum so you can check it out for yourself!

If your children love the app (which I’m fairly confident they will) you can sign up after the free trial for just £39.95 for an annual subscription. This works out at less than £2.50 a month which is about the same as a take away coffee!

What is Reading Eggs?

Reading Eggs is a multi award winning learning resource created by expert educators with over 30 years experience.

A multi stage literacy app which grows with your child, Reading Eggs is suitable for ages 2-13 years and is packed full of fun, colourful animated lessons with small, bite sized activities, replicating the structured learning they are used to receiving at school.

Reading Eggs covers 5 essential elements of reading including phonics awareness, phonics instruction, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension, helping children to learn how to read with confidence and develop an enthusiasm for learning.

With fun maps to follow, golden eggs and certificates to earn and even activity sheets to print off to practice skills after the lesson, children can progress at their own pace in a safe, ad free environment.

Which level of Reading Eggs is right for my child?

Reading Eggs Junior

Reading Eggs Junior is the first level of the Reading Eggs programme and is aimed at preschoolers or nursery age children (aged 2-4 years). We first started using Reading Eggs Junior when Neve had just turned 3, helping her to learn some basic letter recognition and phonics skills prior to starting nursery.

Reading Eggs Junior is packed full of fun games and activities that help build alphabet knowledge and ready to read skills with lots of funny animations, toddler games and preschool activities to choose from. With entertaining songs and videos throughout, Reading Eggs Junior is incredibly engaging, holding their attention well and feeling more like play and entertainment rather than education (always a win!).

Reading Eggs Junior also includes a huge library of read aloud books (over 250) alphabet games and phonics awareness activities. With a really user friendly interface, Neve, even at 3, could easily navigate her way around some of the fun games and activities including handwriting practice, number activities, jigsaw puzzles, sorting items by colour and memory games.

Reading Eggs

The next stage up is the main Reading Eggs programme which is aimed at children ages 3-7.

Neve is now four years old and has recently progressed up to this level of the programme which includes structured lessons that teach phonics, sight words and reading skills. In Reading Eggs, lessons get progressively harder as the child progresses. When using Reading Eggs for the first time, you can do a placement test to ensure you start at the right level for your child’s existing knowledge.

Lessons start by navigating their personalised character across a level on map. Each map has 10 lessons which include elements such as picture match (dragging words to match pictures), writing letters, clicking on pictures that begin with a certain letter or sound, blending words and sounds together and reading books aloud.

Children are given lots of praise and positive reinforcement throughout. Each lesson earns children a golden egg with a ‘critter’ or character inside. If your children love surprise blind bags and toy reveals, this is likely to go down a treat! When they reach the end of a level they are given a certificate which parents can print off and use as a way of recording their achievements, something which Neve absolutely loves and is clearly very proud of herself when she hits a new milestone.

As well as regular email updates for parents, another handy tool is the parent dashboard, which clearly outlines your child’s progress and estimated reading age.

Watching Neve confidently navigate her way around Reading Eggs is really heart warming to watch – not only does she dance along with the music whilst she plays, but I can actually hear her sounding out the words as the topic of the lesson starts to sink in, repeating the phonics sounds that she has heard in a song or story. This reinforces the fact that the lessons really do work, helping her even at a young age understand the links between the visual letters and the sound that they make in words.

Fast Phonics 5-10 years

Fast Phonics is a fairly recent addition to the Reading Eggs programme and can be used alongside the other elements for emerging readers or children who may be struggling with blending and phonics.

Fast Phonics has 20 fun packed levels that help 5-10 year olds with key phonic sounds including letter and sound recognition.

With fun animated videos, visual memory aids and motivating rewards for each level completed, Fast Phonics and its friendly Yeti avatar even comes with hundreds of downloadable worksheets and reporting for parents.

Erin is now in Year 3 (aged 7) but her spelling sometimes still catches her out. Using the later stages of Fast Phonics, the games and activities can help her practice and test her vocabulary, sounds and spelling whilst feeling more like play and less like homework!

Reading Eggspress

The final stage of Reading Eggs is Reading Eggspress, for children aged 7-13 years.

In this section, children who have already learned to read can build up key literacy skills and reading comprehension with both fiction and non fiction texts, practising their reading and answering questions around what they have read. Not only is this a great way to enhance their ability to retrieve information from the text but also use inferences and expand their vocabulary.

A placement test with 20 questions is used at the start to assess your child’s current reading ability. Each lesson that follows includes a number of pre-reading activities that build comprehension strategies, then an extract is read, followed by a 10- or 16-question comprehension quiz.

Reading Eggspress also comes with a huge ebook library of over 2500 books (fiction, non fiction and poetry), practical spelling lessons and tests, allowing children to select their own topics or practice areas they may be finding tricky.

As with the rest of the Reading Eggs programme, the more children engage with the lessons, the more rewards they earn. In Reading Eggspress, the golden eggs allow them to buy items such as clothing for their avatar, decorations for a virtual house and even virtual pets.

Finally, in The Stadium, children can compete against other children across the world; practising their spelling, grammar and vocabulary fluency in timed games such as Spelling Sprint and Grammar Skating.

Our Overall Thoughts on Reading Eggs

Overall, we are HUGE fans of the Reading Eggs programme and I have never hesitated to recommend it to other parents if they ask for our favourite educational apps for kids.

Now more than ever it’s great for children to be able to logon and independently work through an educational programme at their own pace without needing to worry about ads or them seeing inappropriate content.

If you’d like to give Reading eggs a try for yourself access your free 30 day trial and let your child be the judge! 🙂