Beside the books there is a short set of word games. Your child is offered them once a day on their own home screen, and they can walk past without anything happening.
A set takes a few minutes. Your child is taught one letter sound, practises it with help and then without it, and tries it on a word that is not a real word. It needs no microphone.
What is in a set
The same shape every time, because that is what makes it teaching rather than quizzing:
- Something they already know, to start with, and quickly.
- One sound, and exactly one. A set that introduced two would have
introduced neither.
- Practice with the answer still in view, then practice without it.
- A word nobody has ever written, such as "shup" or "fim".
That last one is the only way to tell the difference between a child who has the sound and a child who has learned the shape of a word they have seen before. A child who has "sh" reads "shup" straight off. A child who has memorised "ship" and "shop" reads it as one of those, or stops. Older children are told plainly that it is not a real word and why; younger ones are told it is a silly word.
How the sound is chosen
From what your child's reading has already shown. When they read a page aloud to Pip, we work out which sounds the words that went wrong were built from. When they play the word games, we have a much clearer answer, because there is no guessing about what they said.
The next sound is the earliest one they have not got, and anything that has to come first comes first: there is no point on the letter "m" for a child who cannot yet hear that "mat" starts with a sound at all. A sound that had settled and has since slipped comes before a new one.
If the same kind of mistake keeps happening, the games change rather than get easier. Vowels that keep swapping get put side by side to be heard against each other. A pair of letters that keeps coming apart gets matched to its sound.
What your child sees
No score, no count, no timer, and no streak. There is a row of dots along the top showing where they are in the set, and the dots fill whether an answer was right or wrong.
Help is on the screen from the moment a question appears, rather than appearing after a mistake. A child who has to get something wrong before they are allowed to ask learns that asking is losing.
At the end Pip names the sound they worked on, and that is all.
What is kept
The same switch as everything else learned about your child: Learn what they enjoy, on their Safety page. It is off unless you turned it on.
With it on, we keep which sounds your child has, how sure we are, how many times they got something right first time with no help, and how many of those were on words they had never met. With it off, the games still work and your child is still taught, and nothing about how it went is written down.
Turning it off afterwards deletes all of it.
Turning the games off
They are not offered at all when:
- your child's reading language is not English;
- their daily reading limit has been used up, or it is past their bedtime;
- there is nothing they need to practise, which is normal for a new reader.
There is no setting for a parent to switch them off on their own yet. If you would rather your child did not see them, turn off Learn what they enjoy and tell us, and we will say plainly whether that is something we will add.
What this is not
It is not a reading scheme and it is not a substitute for school. It teaches letter sounds in the order schools teach them, checks that the books we write use only sounds your child has met, and notices which ones trip them up. Whether that adds up to a difference for your child is a question about your child, and it would need a proper study rather than our word for it. Nothing your child sees here is a test, and nothing you see is a grade.