(1 min read)
Have you seen our recent makeover? New Year — new start we say!
After asking our users what they’d like to see, we’re currently in the process of making our site more helpful for everyone by adding more useful information on our games, making our learning resources more accessible for all and adding a dedicated teacher tab, so that you busy teachers out there don’t waste any precious teaching-time searching for what you need.
We’ve started the makeover with our game pages — check out the links below. We especially LOVE the new Reading for Fun makeover, so be sure to check that one out!
Teach Your Monster to Read
Reading for Fun
Number Skills
Adventurous Eating
We’ve added information to take you through the pedagogical (educational) content, how the games work and how to integrate them into your child’s learning. Meet the experts on our expert pages, find out more about our minigames and even meet the team who worked on all these wonderful monsters!
As always, we’d like to know what our audience thinks. Please send us your feedback! Is there anything you’d like to see on our website that we don’t currently have? Let us know by contacting us via [email protected].
(1 min read)
This month, we are adding our comic ‘Bongo Blows His Top’ to our game Reading for Fun. ‘Bongo Blows His Top’ is a story about BIG feelings and how to manage them. Created under the advisement of Angharad Rudkin, a Child Clinical Psychologist, this comic explores the feelings you get when experiencing anger, helping children identify their own feelings and sharing strategies to help deal with those tricky feelings.
As well as all the more practical elements, having comics in Reading for Fun adds another genre of reading to the richness of our game, exposing kids to all types of text. As a person with a passion for illustration and someone who leans towards the more visual side of learning, comic books still make up part of my regular reading material, allowing the enjoyment of the art AND reading at the same time.
Whether your kid is a visual learner or not, they'll love this. So tell your Reading for Fun fan that we’re adding a new comic for them to earn for their monster’s bookshelf, and get them to share it with you when they do… I’m sure you’ll agree it’s a great addition to our game.
Keep an eye on our social posts, as we'll announce when this has been added so you can make sure to update the game and get this comic!
If you'd like a preview of 'Bongo Blows His Top', you can download the full comic from our 'Comics' area in our Learning Resources.
Kay Leathers
Ex-teacher, illustrator and freelance consultant for Teach Your Monster.
(2 min read)
WORLD BOOK DAY! A charity that’s passionate about reading. Why? According to the World Book Day website, “Reading for fun is the single biggest indicator that a child will grow up to enjoy a happier and more successful life – more than their family circumstances, their parents’ educational backgrounds or their income.”
As you know, we are very passionate about reading here at Teach Your Monster, from learning your first letter sounds to reading longer sentences, texts and reading different types of books for pleasure.
That’s why this World Book Day, on the 6th March, 2025, we’ll offer both our literacy apps, Teach Your Monster to Read and Reading for Fun for FREE, for 24 hours only! Be sure to share the news with all the teachers and parents you know, so they can get it on the day.
We love to see how the games help support real-life reading away from the screen. We’re sure that all the parents out there are getting ready to share their favourite childhood books, or perhaps looking to pick up a new favourite using the £1/€1.50 book token.
Whatever you’re doing this World Book Day, it’s a day to celebrate the magic of reading and especially encourage reading for pleasure. We hope you and your little ones enjoy some time to sit down with a good book!
To help give you a little extra free time to relax and read, we’ve also created free reading resources, including character masks from our reading game Reading for Fun, which are perfect for a quick and easy World Book Day costume... Happy reading!
For more information about World Book Day, please visit the website.
World Book Day® is a registered charity, company and trademark.
2024 has been an incredible year for Teach Your Monster, with millions of children benefiting from our fun, educational games that inspire confidence and a love of learning. None of this happens without you! Here’s how we’ve made a difference together this year…
Building Confidence with Numbers
Since the launch of Number Skills Stage 3 in August, children have played the new mini-games 3.5 million times! This research-backed, curriculum-aligned numbers game is helping children aged 3 to 6 practise their number skills and grow in confidence in a way that’s both fun and educational, whether at school or at home.
Inspiring a Love of Reading
Our flagship game, Teach Your Monster to Read, welcomed an incredible 3 million new players in 2024, helping children around the world take their first steps into reading. Meanwhile, the delightful Reading for Fun game has been played 35 million times this year! With its quaint village setting and over 70 books to explore, children have read more than 30 million books in the game so far. One parent shared their thoughts with us:
“My daughter loves this game. She loves the books and the monsters that she interacts with. Thank you for developing such great games!!” ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Encouraging Adventurous Eating
Adventurous Eating helps children explore a variety of fruits and vegetables, and it continues to thrive, with 3,000 children playing every day. Designed with Dr Lucy Cooke, an expert in children’s eating habits, this game complements early years food education and was recognised as a finalist in the Games for Change 2024 Awards in the Health and Wellness category! Get yourself into Bub’s Garden and grow some veggies today!
Supporting New Beginnings
Starting school can be a big milestone, and our brand new comic “First Day Nerves” has been a comforting resource for many families. Downloaded over 40,000 times this year, this beautifully illustrated comic (created with input from child psychologist Dr Angharad Rudkin) helps ease children into their early school days. It’s free to print in colour or black and white.
Thank you for your support
None of this would be possible without YOU, our wonderful community! By playing, sharing, and purchasing the apps, you’re directly supporting our not-for-profit mission to give millions of children the best start in life through learning, fun and play. Every penny goes back into creating new games and resources to empower children.
Thank you for making 2024 a year of incredible impact! ❤️
Developed with Dr Lucy Cooke, our game Adventurous Eating aims to turn fussy eaters into Adventurous Eaters - but just what is the research behind this? In this article, we explore the SAPERE method and its influence on Adventurous Eating.
Teach Your Monster Adventurous Eating is designed as a fun game for kids that almost works like a TV show with a different food or vegetable featured in every food party. It has games and catchy songs, plus the chance to grow their own food in Bub’s garden. But as with all our games, underpinning the entertainment is some serious research. In this case the Sapere Method.
What is the Sapere method?
Developed by the French chemist and ethnologist (which is a kind of social scientist) Jacques Puisais, the SAPERE method is based on engaging the senses and knowing their importance in getting to know food and learning eating habits in childhood. The method derives from years of expert research in nutrition and education.
The SAPERE method was developed to address various eating challenges, including food allergies, promoting diverse eating habits in children, and combating rising obesity rates. Tested on children of different ages, people who worked with the children found measured improvements in varied eating habits.
By making use of all the human senses — smell, taste, sight, hearing, and touch — children can learn new things about food through experimentation and their personal experience. The more children engage with food and watch others engage with food too, the more likely they are to build a complete sensory adventure into food.
This method also encourages children to give their opinions about food and share their experience of trying new things. Any child’s experience of a particular food is not right or wrong, it’s just their experience - which is always ok! Furthermore, during tests, it’s been discovered that when children observe others trying new foods, they’re more likely to give it a go themselves. It is the principles behind this that are woven into the Adventurous Eating game - creating a really fun and safe space for children to explore new foods with their monster… and be encouraged to give them a try in real life too.
Challenges with food can often begin in toddler years
Our Adventurous Eating expert Dr. Lucy Cooke says “People's food preferences and eating habits track through the lifetime. We know that lots of fussy children do eventually grow out of it and become better eaters later, but at the same time, laying down a foundation of good eating in early childhood is likely to track all the way through life. It's just better for children to eat well from the start.”
Doubts and fear of new food, or ‘food neophobia’, is at its strongest in two to three-year-olds, and it might take a few steps to overcome these fears.
Researchers have observed that the more a child notices that a food substance is available, the more often it will be chosen later. Children need to taste something roughly fifteen to twenty times in order to become familiar with a new food. The research also noted that children who have difficulties with sensory integration (how the brain interprets things we sense) also benefit greatly from the method.
How does Adventurous Eating help with food aversion?
Adventurous Eating reflects some of the key theory behind the SAPERE method using fun sensory mini-games. Children get to take their monster to a food party, where they encourage them to try a variety of fruit and veg using all their senses. The narrator provides gentle, encouraging language, while the monsters express their preferences throughout the game—perfectly modelling the idea that food is a safe, enjoyable experience and that it's okay not to like everything you try.
Dr. Lucy Cooke says “Food in reality can be quite stressful for children. If children are able to explore things in an app, with some distance, then it can help reduce anxiety in some children.. it’s just a very good way of educating children about foods without actually having to have the food in situ.”
This idea is supported by parents who have tried the Adventurous Eating game with their children. One parent reported:
“My child has food aversion and normally requires weeks of occupational therapy to try a new food. After playing your Adventurous Eating game they tried seven new foods! I made a little notebook so they could rate and tell me how each food felt, smelled, looked, sounded, and tasted - just like in your game. I also asked them to rate it on a scale 1 through 10, and if they would ever try it again. Out of the seven different foods my child tried, they liked two of them. That is HUGE progress for them. I am very thankful for your game!”
In the latest update to the Adventurous Eating game, there’s now a useful ‘Practice Mode.’ You can quickly dive into a particular fruit or veg and let your child explore it with their monster (just before they try it in real life), hopefully leading to easier mealtimes!
To maximise the game’s impact, pair it with real-life activities. For example, ask your child “If your monster has explored a tomato today, maybe we could explore a real one together?” Or copy one of Adventurous Eating’s sense games at home and ask some questions about the food.
We have a helpful list of questions and things to talk about that you can download here.
Good luck with your adventurous eater!
Al Goss
Product Manager for Teach Your Monster Adventurous Eating
Did you know that as well as ‘Adventure Mode’, we have ‘Practice Mode’ in three of our games? If not, then this is the perfect article for you.
We know that practice makes perfect right? Perfection is difficult to achieve (and probably way too much to put on your average 6-year-old!) So here at Teach Your Monster, we believe that practice makes progress. Every repetition and mistake helps children to progress and learn, so we keep practice right at the forefront of all our games.
‘Practice mode’ allows you to access the games contained within ‘Adventure Mode' quickly and directly - think of it as a shortcut menu to the specific learning activities contained within the larger game world. Using practice mode you can speedily create tailored activities for targeting those particular areas where your learner needs to spend focused time. Whether that’s in phonics, early maths or just reminding them why peas are actually a lot of fun - and delicious too!
We know the biggest fans of Practice Mode are teachers, who can select targeted activities for particular children, have a whole-class interactive whiteboard session, or even a quick time-filling activity to get the kids back into their learning after a rowdy playtime. Practice Mode has so many applications, we thought it would be good to remind you all of what it is and how you can access it.
If you have a kid who is struggling with their phonics learning, tricky words and letter sound matching, then Teach Your Monster to Read Practice Mode is just the thing. Brushing up on these skills is made particularly easy with the three options in Practice Mode:
Sighties - For kids to quickly identify sight words (also known as ‘tricky’ or ‘non-decodable’ words)
Minigames - These games are found in Adventure Mode, so this works well side-by-side with what the child has already played. Practise specific grapheme-phoneme-correspondences (GPCs) in a variety of letter-sound matching/blending and segmenting games.
Flashcards - to practise all GPCs with images.
Want to spend more time on a specific game, number or skill? Then go to Practice Mode in Number Skills.
Skill - Select a skill you’d like to practise. This could be counting up, down or on, Number Bonds, Subitising (the ability to recognise numbers without counting) or counting in 2s, 5s or 10s.
Number - Select a particular number or range of numbers to practise.
Game - These mini games are the same games available in Adventure Mode. Select a game and number to focus on.
Adventurous Eating’s Practice Mode allows you to select particular fruit or vegetables, and interact with them using the monster's senses. Designed to allow the adult to select a specific food, Practice Mode allows the child to interact with that food through the game, making them a little bit braver with it. It works well if you have a picky eater who doesn’t like certain foods — tomatoes, for example.
Select tomatoes from Practice Mode and let them play through all the sensory games with the tomato. Next time they encounter one in real life, maybe they will even give it a little try! Perhaps you have a recipe with an unfamiliar food in it? Before cooking give your little one a bit of time to get comfortable with the new fruit or vegetable using Practice Mode. They might even then be excited to try it!
At Teach Your Monster we are always trying to make as much positive impact on our littlest users while helping to make our biggest users' lives easier. We think Practice Mode goes a long way to achieving this. Learn more about Practice Mode here or access it from the game on the web or your at-home app.
It’s that time of year again! Spooky season is upon us and what better than to celebrate with a spooky book exploration? There are a whole lot of spooky kids' books out there, and there’s nothing like a bit of grotesquerie to spark kids' imaginations. Kids love talking about icky, sticky, gooey, oozy, creepy, crawly things and I always got the best writing from my class with a spine-tingling story. In this article, I’ll be sharing one of my favourite tales I used to use in Primary school for encouraging reading, writing and widening children’s vocabulary.
You may have heard of The Frog Prince, but have you heard of The Frog Prince, Continued? Written by Jon Scieszka, it’s a story about what happens after the frog kisses the princess—and they don’t live quite so happily ever after, after all.
If you get your hands on a copy, you’ll see the most weird and wonderful pictures by the illustrator, Steve Johnson. Steve has done a wonderful job of making the witches in the story varied (and all cute and creepy in their own way) and the author, Jon Scieszka, didn’t write any descriptions of the witches, so these were always the best for class discussion.
I’d start by reading the story as an introduction, then stop as we got to the first witch page. As a prompt for discussion, I’d use each illustration of a witch to prompt an ‘adjective harvest’, getting the kids to describe the witch's features and then prompting them to uncover more vocabulary.
For example, if a child described the witch's lips as ‘slimy’, we’d ask “How slimy?” or “Slimy as a…” to prompt similes (a figure of speech comparing one thing with another thing of a different kind, used to make a description more interesting). I could also ask them to extend the sentence “The witch’s lips were so slimy that...” or “When the boy looked at the witch’s slimy lips…”
Once the class had gathered all the adjectives and similes it could, and wrote them up on the board for our ‘word bank’, we’d move on to writing a description of our witch. This same word bank could be used for their own spooky stories, from werewolves to ghosts, goblins and ghouls. The results of these classes were some of the best writing the kids had ever produced, and were a lot of fun too!
So this Halloween, why not try an ‘adjective harvest’ with your class or kid at home? Get a spooky book, read it together and get describing! If you have our game Reading for Fun, check out ‘The Ghostly Galleon’, it’s a great one for getting those spooky juices flowing!
Kay Leathers
A freelance consultant for Teach Your Monster and ex-primary school teacher!
Photo by Drew Perales on Unsplash
This term in reception classes, maths lessons have been largely focused on the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. Teach Your Monster Number Skills also starts off focusing on these first few numbers, both because it matches what your children are learning and because we know helping kids build a solid foundation in numbers leads to a greater chance of maths success later in life. So just what have they been up to and how can we help our kids at home?
Early number learning is based on the ability to count, use different representations of numbers and subitise — the ability to instantly recognise a number without having to count. For example, Number Skills uses fingers and dice to represent the same numbers to build up that instant recognition of a value.
You can use lots of home items for this such as small toys, buttons or coins. One easy idea we liked was to use different coloured dried beans and allow them time to sort the beans into different colour groups based on their quantity. Let them tell you what they did. Rather than overwhelming them with higher numbers, start with a small amount of beans and then you can ask deeper understanding questions like:
How many can you see?
How do you know?
How many are there in each group?
What can you show me?
What can you see?
How many ways can you show me this number?
Why did you organise them in this way?
This will help them build stronger connections between the physical and visual representations and their knowledge of numbers.
Another way to help them with early number recognition is to do a number hunt! Where can they find 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 in your house? Do they count to find how many? Encourage children to create their own collections of things and observe how they do it, can you ask them any of the above questions to help them develop their mathematical thinking?
To help your kid further with number recognition, we’ve created a spooky Number Skills Halloween game. All you’ll need is a dice and some coloured pencils. Simply print the second page, roll the dice and colour the matching number of creepy creatures!
Finally, as we mentioned in our article ‘Maths and Music’ from last October, sound and rhyme are also very important in maths learning. For example, one simple activity you could try is to clap a number of times and see if your child can match a number of objects to the claps they heard.
There are also plenty of early number songs out there, here’s a few suggestions from us:
- Hickory Dickory Dock
- Three blind mice (particularly good if you’re feeling spooky this Halloween!)
- Three Little Speckled Frogs
- And our very own Number Songs found here.
Hopefully, that’s given you a few ideas on how to continue learning at home in fun ways, and you can always play our game Number Skills, which helps you in game form!
Leo Allen
Number Skills Product Manager
(2 minute read)
Summer can be a wild and wonderful time for kids - long days playing games and lots of fun in the sun! But as parents, we all need some time to chill and it can be hard to get the little ones into a relaxed state of mind. So I thought I’d share some of my favourite calming videos and activities from my teaching days to help you and the kids chill out.
- Facetime with Blazer Fresh - This video shows your kids how to make their face and body calm - one minute of tuning into the feeling of calm.
- Melting - A four minute activity where your child simply needs to freeze and thaw - slowly! I used to use this just after playtime in reception - perfect for calming down after lots of physical activity.
- The Body Scanner - this wasn’t the exact one I used but it’s a very good body scan video. Ideal for a mindful moment, this five minute video talks you through a scan of each body part - I recommend a good lie down for this one!
- Make a calming glitter jar - always a permanent fixture in our ‘calm corners’, these easy DIY glitter jars are really great for some mindful watching. I even used to hide little toys in there so kids could follow something around inside the jar. Perfect for channeling calm!
- Rainbow Breathing - I think these breathing activities are really awesome. You can even make your own by drawing a rainbow out and having your child colour it - a 2-4-1 craft and mindfulness activity!
- Read our lovely comic ‘Bongo Blows his top’ - as well as helping to identify some tough feelings, it has some lovely calming strategies to practise at home!
And my final gift to you - one last video to help you with the post-activity clean up - the tidy up song! This was such a valuable tool for a messy classroom, by the end of the song everywhere was tidy and the kids were behind their places. Stickers for extra helpful cleaners were always a great motivator too.
Happy summer holidays to you all!
Kay Leathers
A freelance consultant for Teach Your Monster and ex-primary school teacher!
Photo by Johnny McClung on Unsplash
(5 minute read)
We caught up with maths lover and Number Skills Expert Bernie Westacott in this behind-the-scenes interview.
What’s your favourite number?
91, because whenever we study prime numbers at school and you ask the children to write down all the primes in the nineties, they invariably put 91. And they don't realise that if they know that seven twelves are 84 then another seven will be 13 sevens. So, it's another way of building structures of numbers and making connections. So, I just sort of sit back and laugh about how many get it wrong and then we go through it.
And what do you enjoy most about maths? Why did you get into a lifetime of maths?
Because I was so bad at school. Well, I'm very dyslexic. I have a memory issue, sequencing problems, and everything was by rote at school. And I really didn't enjoy it. I didn't do too well at it. And I wanted to become a teacher. So I hoped that there was another way of doing it.
And a lot of people, when they don't enjoy something at school, they run a mile from it.
Yeah, I go the opposite way. I'm dogged, I like to solve problems. I like to get on top of things. I don't like them to get on top of me. And then I kept working and working at it, particularly when I started teaching. And then, as a result of that, I fell in love with it, became very passionate about it, and then tried to pass that onto my pupils.
So what are the problems facing children at the moment?
What are the problems facing children in mathematics? Number sense is a huge issue. Children don't develop a sense of number, how it works, how it hangs together. You will see children in this country and other countries age 16 who still don't know that seven is made up of five and two, four and three.
So they don't have this fluency, this ability to break a number apart and put it back together. That is one of the big issues. Another issue that's right across the curriculum is there's too much content and children do not have enough time to play, explore, collaborate, discuss and reason.
The problems start from the very beginning, particularly in the UK at the moment, because there is a drive for the dogma of the knowledge-rich curriculum and it completely flies in the face of everything we know about how young children learn mathematics.
And that is becoming a real issue.
Could you talk a little bit more about your concerns around the knowledge-rich curriculum?
The knowledge rich curriculum comes out of, I think, a slight misunderstanding of cognitive science, that declarative knowledge that 'I know this' and 'I know that' and mathematics is more about understanding structure and concepts than knowing knowledge. Declarative knowledge also comes about as a result of experiences that young children have, not solely by rehearsing statements or facts. Though it's great to know number facts, you have to understand the structure, how these things are built together there and that knowledge-rich curriculum or dogma is in danger of taking that away from young children what they need to be doing.
Why is creativity important in Maths?
Creativity is an aspect of maths I think that's very important for young children. You don't just learn to solve problems because somebody taught you a way to solve this problem. You need to reason and do things for yourself and 'investigate and explore' - words that are being taken out of the curriculum at the moment. I feel creativity is important in mathematics, so I don't want children to see it as something they learn and they do off by rote.
I want them to be able to create their own ideas. So, we've been working with young children on number bonds and we built some frames to fit things in. We want to see how many different ways they can develop and do that and be creative, but also in doing that creatively, they will slowly start to pick up a systematic way of doing things. So I think it's a very important area to do from the very beginning.
So what's been your involvement in Number Skills?
My involvement in Number Skills has been, first of all, to identify the key areas that young children need to be developing in mathematics, and then to outline what the pedagogy looks like, and then to work with the game developers so that they can make that fun and bring that in. Between the all of us, we're developing fun games that are pedagogically sound and based on current and latest research.
Working with the team has been very different from the teaching experience I've had. It's been a very collaborative experience and it's been very creative. I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it and hope to keep doing that.
How does Number Skills support the learning of these mathematical concepts?
On the one hand, it's playing games, so children are relaxed, they're comfortable, they're having fun. They don't even realise that they're learning.
But on the other hand it's all presented in a way that's pedagogically and research-based correct as well. And they're just enjoying themselves, learning things.
So, what are the exciting upcoming features that you're working on with the Number Skills team?
Lots of different things. One of the most exciting features is the Sandbox, where children go in and it's free play, which we would like to have a lot of. They're constructing their own world, their own ideas, their own understanding. They can investigate and explore. These are key elements of the creativity aspect of mathematics.
Finally, what’s your favourite game in Number Skills?
I have one I love. My favourite game out of all of them is Slides because it evolved through a lot of conversations and it's got a very important thing in it, which is that we start with a number and we decompose it into two parts, but we see them go down the slide and the important bottom line is that we see them recombine at the end.
So, we have the inverse process in mathematics where you separate and join together. And already children are seeing that the breaking apart and joining together are inverse processes. I think it's very powerful message.
Follow Bernie and his amazing work here and look out for the new updates to Number Skills by following our Teach Your Monster social channels (links below).
