As a parent, you want to make sure your child has the best chance at success in life. The best way to help them develop skills and a love of learning is to start them off on the right foot when it comes to literacy and education. Reading comprehension, spelling, and writing are all key facets of a successful education—and they all begin with phonics.
Unfortunately, many parents are concerned that their children might struggle with reading and writing because they have not attended a private school or received extra tutoring. However, the good news is that these days it’s easier than ever before to work on phonics with your child right at home! And the best way to stay engaged with phonics exercises is to download some apps. Here, we will review the top five free apps for phonics that you can use to help your child improve their reading skills.
Table of Contents
Best Apps For Phonics
The key skill in phonics is to learn the letters and the sounds they make and how to put them together to make and read simple words. Our selection of phonics apps covers important phonics topics for a variety of ages and grade levels. There are no shortage of phonics apps, games, and websites out there in the market. From letter sounds to consonant blends to diphthongs to rhyming words, these apps will help children engage with phonics practice in a fun, challenging and exciting way.
Phonics apps are a great way for young learners to practice phonics lessons. These Phonics apps for kids will help your child to practise sounding out words, which will help them to read.
These interactive phonics apps will help teach children the relationship between letters and sounds and develop the skills needed to read and write. These Phonics apps help kids learn important phonics skills, including recognizing the sounds each letter makes, mastering the alphabets and word building.
Here is the list of the best phonics apps. Most of them are free of charge and available for Android, as well as iOS.
Best Phonics Apps for Kids
Reading Eggs
- Reading Eggs
(Android, iPhone, iPad)
Reading Eggs aims to help young children learn basic phonics skills through the fun exploration of phonics games as they make their journeys through different self-paced games. Reading Eggs teaches letter-sound combinations with one-on-one instructional lessons, games and e-books. Children learn to read through phonics as they begin the process of learning this important life skill.
Reading Eggs is based on solid scientific research to give your child the best chance at reading success. Children complete animated online lessons where they learn essential phonics reading skills. The variety of fun activities within each lesson provides the repetition needed for these skills to become part of the child’s long term memory.
The app helps your children learn phonics, letters, numbers and the alphabet. The app features a series of games to help kids recognize letters, associate them with phonic sounds, play with the alphabet letters and numbers. Children also gain confidence by reading online books that only contain words they have already studied in the programme.
Price: Free with in-app purchases
Devices: iOS, Android, Web
Hooked on Phonics
- Hooked on Phonics
(Android, iPhone, iPad)
Hooked on Phonics app is a comprehensive phonics program that includes a full phonics curriculum for an entire class of students. Hooked on Phonics includes 12 steps; each teaches rimes and letter sounds to help kids build words. Within each step, videos with catchy songs introduce letter sounds and sight words, and games help kids build words using onsets and rimes.
The step-by-step approach, with reviews built in via songs and ebooks, is very effective for teaching reading. Teachers will appreciate the mix of phonics and sight words, and kids will enjoy the variety of delivery — songs, games, and books — and the predictability of how each step advances. Hooked on Phonics is a great app for children ages 3-8 or those reading between a Pre-K and 2nd grade level.
Price: Free to try
Devices: iOS, Android, Web
IXL
Read with Phonics
- Read with Phonics
(Android, iPhone, iPad)
Read with Phonics is a phonics based app that helps young people to learn synthetic phonics in a colourful and interactive way. It improves letter sounds recognition and is a great stepping stone to help your little ones on their reading journey! Read with Phonics is a simple app that has been extremely well developed by professionals proficient in not only the topic of phonics but also with a very good understanding of the education and classroom setting.
The phonics app follows the curriculum and all synthetics phonics programs. Practice segmenting and blending skills, grapheme recognition, pseudo words, word comprehension and more.
Practicing your phonics sounds for just 5 minutes a day is proven to be the best way to improve early reading skills, whether in the car on the drive home from school, snuggled up on the sofa or sitting outside in the garden on a nice summers day! The positive reward system the game offers is very motivating and the different ways the app challenges a child to think about each letter; from recognising the grapheme to putting it into a word is impressive.
Price: Free with in-app purchases
Devices: iOS, Android, Web
Get unlimited access to the 4 or 5-star teacher certified apps. Start your free trial now!
Hand-picked educational apps by teachers that will improve your child’s learning.
Teach Your Monster to Read
- Teach Your Monster to Read
(Android, iPhone, iPad)
Teach Your Monster to Read is an award-winning phonics game that’s helped millions of children learn phonics in a fun way. You can download this free phonics game for teaching preschoolers and kindergartners.
The game covers everything from letters and sounds to reading full sentences. Kids can enjoy animated phonics songs for both revising and teaching letter-sounds. The songs are catchy and easily adaptable and children will want to sing along and invent their own.
The app is highly recommended by teachers and complements phonics program used in schools. It covers everything from letters and sounds to reading full sentences. Teach Your Monster to Read is also available to play online free of charge.
Price: $2.99 on iOS and Android
Devices: iOS, Android, Web
ABC Phonics
- ABC Phonics
(Android)
ABC Phonics is a great app for phonics that teach letter sounds. The app has fun phonics song animations for alphabets A to Z. The phonics songs are very catchy and it seems to help the kids identify the letters and sounds a lot. Kids learn to write each letter with ABC Phonics and has 26 educational games to play with words. With songs and games featured on this app, this is one of the most engaging phonic app you can download.
Price: Free with in-app purchases
Devices: Android
abc PocketPhonics
- abc PocketPhonics
(iPhone, iPad)
abc PocketPhonics app covers all the sounds and children have the opportunity to practise blending and segmenting to read and write words. It teaches students the sounds of different letters and basic words. This app uses the Phonics method as taught in UK schools, to develop reading skills. It also closely matches the order in which schools will usually teach different sounds, as defined in the National Curriculum.
The app demonstrates a clear focus on phonemes: sounding them out, spelling them, and using them to form words. abc PocketPhonics uses a phoneme-centered approach to teaching kids to read. When kids see a phoneme, they say it, write it, and then use it in a word. When they’ve completed a packet of phonemes and word constructions, they get a number of stars (from one to three) based on how well they traced the letters and how many mistakes they made choosing phonemes to form the words.
Price: $6.99
Devices: iOS
Phonics Genius
- Phonics Genius
(iPhone, iPad)
Phonics Genius is one of the comprehensive phonics app available to help kids identify letter sounds and their relationship to words. Phonics Genius is a great resource for building phonemic awareness and is best for kids who are emergent readers with the previous reading experience.
Phonics Genius includes over 6,000 words grouped by phonics sound, so it is fully loaded to teach your child about phonics. The app includes several pages through which you can scroll and find the particular sound you want to work on. You can work on sounds as well as the beginning and ending of words.
Phonics Genius provides three different modes of learning, in addition to multiple quiz modes designed as fun and interactive games. The quizzes are designed according to different levels of learning beginning with two words and range from easy to challenging.
Price: $0.99
Devices: iOS
Pirate Phonics
- Pirate Phonics
(iPhone, iPad)
Pirate Phonics is packed with 41 phonic sounds spread across five islands. Learners will have to explore the islands and find the clues that will help them to find their treasure. This phonics app will help preschoolers learn and develop their phonic skills and reinforce their phonic blends and sounds in reading.
Pirate Phonics teaches children the letter – sound correspondences that are essential in reading and writing. The whole app introduces more than 300 words and is targeted at pre-readers. Kids engage in repetition through games and this is a very effective strategy for memorising and retaining the sounds more easily.
Each phonic sound is emphasised through the use of several ‘picture words’ which are deliberately read slowly by the narrator. The small games following were really fun and kids will love playing them.
Price: $2.99
Devices: iOS
Monkey Word School Adventure
- Monkey Word School Adventure
(Android, iPhone, iPad)
A cheery educational app with games in phonics, letter recognition, rhymes, tracing, and wordplay. Monkey Word School Adventure uses six different mini activities to help them with reading skills through phonics and word groups. Each activity adjusts to your child’s ability level. Many of the activities also allow kids to self-correct to solve the given problems. Each activity is short and moves automatically to the next challenge.
With Monkey Word School Adventure you are able to customize the play for up to three children based on reading group levels. You can also set the challenge level appropriately in settings as difficulty increases based on the performance.
The language learning ranges from letter recognition and writing to spelling and phonics introducing word components such as consonant blends, digraphs, and irregular vowels. This tool is great for kids who need assistance with their phonics skills.
Price: $1.99
Devices: iOS, Android
Endless Alphabet
- Endless Alphabet
(Android, iPhone, iPad)
Endless Alphabet is a simple and very creative app with cute monsters and clever animations that provides interactive learning opportunities in reading, spelling, and vocabulary for toddlers and early learners. The app allows children to practice their alphabets and learning new words with animations demonstrating the meanings of the words in an unforgettable way.
Price: $8.99
Devices: iOS, Android
Jolly Phonics is a phonics app designed to help kids practise the phonics they’ve already been taught at school. With beautifully drawn scenes to display the learning content, this app will attract children to engage with it.
See Words app takes the stress out of teaching your child to read. It is an engaging and educational tool that will provide your child with the basic fundamentals of reading. It is perfect for Pre-K, Kindergarten, and First Grade classrooms and After-School Programs.
Readers trace letters, unlocking a series of photographic images that begin with that letter’s sound, prompting them to say them aloud. Readers build words using word families and the sounds they learned in Level 1. Readers spell words as they are spoken to them, using the sound tiles included. Once a new word has been built, the word is saved for teachers to access and review.
These phonics apps will help the children continue to move toward literacy and have fun at the same time. Have a favorite Phonics app that we missed? Let us know!
best phonics apps for adults
When one associate sounds with alphabets or letters, this method to teach reading is called phonics. Phonics is all about how different letters of the alphabet are pronounced. The correct pronunciation is essential for non-native English speakers preparing for Universal Exams like TOEFL, IELTS, TOEIC, and others.
Why use phonics apps?
A diverse range of apps is available on both Android and iOS platforms to assist adult learners in improving their reading. Phonics apps are great tools for adult learners to start reading because of these solid reasons!
Learn at your own pace. The lessons or activities are pre-recorded, so the learner does not fear missing out on some lessons. One can pause and play and repeat a segment as many times as s/he wants.
Interactive lessons. The segments are so made that the learner can touch the word or sentence and listen to its pronunciation.
Good engagement = more significant learning. Many apps have been made in a game format so that the learner is always engaged and constantly aims to reach higher, complex phonics levels.
Scope for practice. Apps have multiple levels of complexity, which helps learners to improve themselves independently. Since one can repeat any module any number of times, the learner can practice repeatedly.
Compatible. Learners can find these apps on any platform of their convenience suited to their device. Most of these are free to use, but a few offer more features at a premium price.
List of five easy-to-use & user-friendly phonics apps for adults.
- Phonics Genius
Phonics Genius Apps
The app has a vast repository of over 6000 words, grouped into 225 categories by their phonics sounds. While it is designed for children, its interface is clean and suitable for adults with learning disabilities like ESL and ABE students. A multi-sensory learning tool, the app merges audio, speech, and written media for a real-life engagement of the learner with language.
READ : 9 Famous Doctors With Dyslexia: “If They Can Do It, You Can Too”
Features:
Words are grouped by the position of the phonic sound (beginning/medial/end).
User can record their voice, playback and compare with the pre-loaded sound. The articulation practice enables students to recapitulate learned concepts.
Quiz modes are inbuilt for solid understanding.
AppLink: Appstore
- What’s Changed? Skill Builder
What’s Changed? Skill Builder Apps
The app uses a gaming interface to develop the user’s phonemic awareness, i.e. the ability to discern between sounds or sequence of sounds within a word. It works on the learner’s phonemic awareness of vowel sounds and consonant joins through rigorous exercises. The practice sets require the learner to listen to two non-words and identify which sound changed between them. The exercises may involve:
identifying a changed sound (‘zat’ to ‘zad’)
assigning or omitting the appropriate letter to the changed sound (‘field to ‘field)
switching two letters for sounds that were switched (‘blist’ to ‘blits’)
The app merely focuses on improving phonics awareness but does not help in spelling.
The app is excellent for English language learners who seek to enhance their auditory discrimination and pronunciation of English.
Features:
The app has three categories of games, each with four successive levels of difficulty, where words build from VC (e.g. ‘ob’) to CCVCC (e.g. ‘brisp’).
In the Standard English category, user can develop the letter-sound association.
The Readable English category reinforces the learnings from the first category, including the non-standard sounds of letters. Readers can identify non-standard sounds of letters marked with a glyph.
In the Colour category, sounds are represented by colors. It requires the reader to focus on auditory discrimination rather than sound-symbol association strictly.
READ : 9 Online Phonics Games For Little Learners
AppLink: Playstore | Appstore
- Ultimate Phonics Reading App
Ultimate Phonics Reading App
The app is a very clean, no-frills platform that suits adult readers with ESL, learning disabilities, or beginner readers. With various interactive exercises, learners will effectively sound out complex words and progress into speed-reading.
Features:
The app has a good mix of words in its vast word list and features decodable sentences, all broken down into phonemes for clarity and in-depth understanding.
The Find feature helps readers look up lessons matching any phonogram.
The program is comprehensive in its teaching of the intricacies of English speech, a word bank of 4,400 words and 2,100 sentences organized into 262 lessons. The lessons are grouped into 12 levels of increasing complexity to help students self-learn the entire English phonics system.
While the first level (lessons 1 to 50) is free to access, successive levels are unlocked at a one-time payment or level-wise installment-basis payments.
AppLink: Playstore | Appstore
- Lexico: A Dyslexia Reading Aid
Lexico: A Dyslexia Reading Aid Apps
Adult learners who want to venture into independent reading need practice above and beyond the limited practice words. Mexico is a clean, distraction-free e-book reader that enables learning impaired adult readers to control their reading ability. It uses a glare-free, high-contrast display with a dyslexia-friendly typeface and interface that benefits new readers or learning-impaired readers.
Features:
User can tap the “read” button to view a single word at a time, breaking them into syllables.
The Audiobook Mode enables the reader to select a comfortable reading speed, mark the text to be read, and have the app read aloud. You can also tap words to hear how they are pronounced.
The app bundles word-tracking and crossing exercises that help users speed up their reading, helping them develop skills to read across a line and down to the following line.
Custom lists help users build their library of complex words to listen to for their phonics and spelling improvement.
Conclusion
Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.
Check out other publications to gain access to more digital resources if you are just starting out with Flux Resource.
Also contact us today to optimize your business(s)/Brand(s) for Search Engines