Teach Your Monster to Read

There are three Teach Your Monster to Read games to play, covering 2 years of the reading journey. Please read through their educational content to decide which game is right for your child.

Game 1: First Steps

For children just starting to learn letters and sounds.

First Steps gives children extra practice for whichever phonics scheme they’re using in school.

• Practice for 31 letter-sound combinations:
  s, a, t, p, i, n, m, d, g, o, c, k, ck, e, u, r, h, b, f, ff, l, ll, ss, j, qu, v, w, x, y, z, zz
• Blending and segmenting practice with CVC words
• The first 6 non-decodable (‘tricky”) words

Get a full overview of First Steps (pdf)

Game 2: Fun With Words

For children who are confident with early letter-sound combinations and are starting to read sentences.

NB: If you’re not sure, try game 1 first.

Fun With Words gives children extra practice for whichever phonics scheme they’re using in school:

• Practice of new letter-sound combinations:
• ch, sh, th, ng, ai, ee, igh, oa, oo, ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ear, air, ure, er
• Lots of blending and segmenting practice with CVC, CVCC, CCV and CCVC words
• Practice of non-decodable (‘tricky’) words:
• he, she, the, to, we, me, be, was, no, go, my, you, they, her, all, are, said, so, have, like, some, come, were, there, little, one, do when, out, what
• Reading and comprehension of sentences, from short ones such as “Get the cat” to longer ones such as “Can you get me an owl that is not green or red?”
  

Get a full overview of Fun With Words (pdf)

Game 3: Champion Reader

For children who are confidently reading short sentences and know all of the basic letter-sound combinations.

Important: Champion Reader is our most advanced game and children should be ready to play it.

They must:

• be able to read and understand short sentences like: ‘Go and get me a black bee for my jar,' she said.
• have secure knowledge of the following graphemes / phonemes:
  s, a, t, p, i, n, m, d, g, o, c, k, ck, e, u, r, h, b, f, ff, l, ll, ss, j, qu, v, w, x, y, z, zz, ch, sh, th, ng, ai, ee, igh, oa, oo, ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ear, air, ure, er

The game gives children extra practice for whichever phonics scheme they’re using in school:

• Introduces alternative spellings of sounds (e.g. /ai/ as used in eight and they)
• Introduces alternative pronunciations (e.g. i as pronounced in fin and find)
• More non-decodable (‘tricky”) words
• Lots of reading for meaning and comprehension - from sentences to magical little books



Get a full overview of Champion Reader (pdf)

Teach Your Monster Reading for Fun

Reading For Fun is a game that encourages kids to have fun and enjoy reading! Designed with experts from the UK’s Roehampton University to get kids reading more, it inspires kids to explore a magical village full of fascinating facts and spellbinding stories.

The game encourages children of all ages to read for pleasure and is perfect to play at home or school, alongside Teach Your Monster to Read or on its own.

WHY READING FOR FUN?

• Boost reading confidence
• Develop empathy, as they put themselves in different characters’ shoes and develop an understanding of the wider world
• Improve skills in reading for different purposes, from recipes, to signposts and instructions
• Read books with friends. Choose brand new books, or re-read old favourites
• Create positive screen time for children in a fun environment
• Collect over 70 brilliant free ebooks from Usborne, Okido, Otter-Barry and more.

Reading for pleasure is a proven method to transform literacy skills and academic performance in children. The pedagogy of reading for pleasure within this game has been developed in close collaboration with educational experts from the UK’s Roehampton University.

Teach Your Monster Number Skills

Designed with experts in early years math to align with the Pre-K and Reception curriculum, Teach Your Monster: Number Skills will reinforce critical number abilities such as splitting numbers in useful ways using number bonds, the fundamentals of addition and subtraction, counting, and subitising. The more kids play with these core concepts, the better their number sense becomes, giving them a solid foundation for success in math, in school and beyond.

Incorporating the latest research on early years math, the game, which spans across 40 exciting levels — with more coming soon — is designed for children aged 3 to 6+ and continually adapts, rapidly becoming more challenging as children progress. The pace of play is tailored to each child, only moving on when the child has mastered the concept they are practicing. More confident children can fast track to the level best suited to them while ensuring any gaps in their knowledge are covered — crucial in avoiding problems when exposed to more advanced concepts in the future.

Number Skills is:

• Packed full of fun mini-games to practice and reinforce key number skills.
• Designed in collaboration with three world-renowned, early years mathematics experts: Bernie Westacott, Dr Helen J. Williams and Dr Sue Gifford.
• Helps kids develop a strong foundation in numbers and mathematics.
• Designed to be played at home too.

What's in the game?

• Counting — including the surprisingly complex array of concepts which feed into this, such as stable order, 1-2-1 correspondence, cardinality and so on
• Subitising — also known as the ability to recognize numbers of things without counting
• Number bonds — including the composition of each number up to 5 (number bonds up to 10 coming very soon), and how to use them to split up and recombine numbers in useful ways.
• Addition and subtraction — building on their work with number bonds children develop fluency with the fundamentals of addition and subtraction
• Ordinality and magnitude — including knowing numbers in the right order; knowing where they are in relation to key points such as 0, 5, and 10; and knowing that as you move up each number is one more and move one down it’s one less
• Manipulatives — the game uses teaching objects known as manipulatives to represent number problems in lots of different ways including fingers, five frames, ten frames, and dice patterns.

You can read a more detailed explanation of the educational concepts covered in each mini game here.

Teach Your Monster Adventurous Eating

A ground-breaking game that encourages kids to eat a broader range of fruit and veg and build a better relationship with food.

Inspired by the Sapere method, Adventurous Eating is a game developed with child feeding specialist Dr Lucy Cooke. This scientific learning technique encourages children to learn new things about food. They do this by using all five senses; sight, touch, smell, hearing and taste.

• Packed full of fun mini-games that encourage 3-6+ year olds to explore foods with all five of their senses.
• Designed in collaboration with Dr Lucy Cooke, an expert in children’s food preferences and eating habits.
• Complements Pre-K/Pre-School and Reception/Kindergarten food education and is inspired by The SAPERE Method.
  

How does it work?

A child makes their very own monster guided through the game by Bub. From our research, we know that kids love caring for characters. It also allows children to be a bit braver with trying new things, playing through their monster.

Their monster plays a fun mini-game at each of the five tables at the party, one for each sense. Kids love that their monsters are exploring the food and reacting! Their monster won’t always like the food they try, and that’s OK—next time, they might. In real life, we’ve found that the children become more open to exploring the food too.

Their monster uses its senses to explore over 40 different fruit and vegetables!