Ten Things to Love About Teach Your Monster to Read

 1. It's fun.

Students will love playing this fun literacy game. Students begin by designing a monster.  This monster goes on an adventure in a spaceship, but it crashes. It needs to learn to read so it can understand the repair manual and fix the spaceship. Students will learn to read along with their monster as they meet new challenges and develop early literacy skills.

2. There are three games in one.

Teach Your Monster to Read includes three games: First Steps, Fun With Words, and Champion Reader. When you set up your class you can choose to start individual students on whatever level fits best. Students will learn their letters and sounds, develop their skills with segmenting and blending, memorize trick words, and read sentences. Read more about each game here.

3. You can track student learning.

View a student one at a time online or download all student data to view their stats. You can see where students left off, a timestamp of the last date played, and percentage accuracy for each grapheme. This can help you choose graphemes to target for small group or one-on-one instruction.

4. It works on any device.

Teach Your Monster to Read can be played online from any device. If working on a mobile device or tablet, download the app from the App Store, Google Play, or Amazon appstore.

5. You can play for free.

The online version is totally free with nothing to buy ever. The apps are available on their respective app stores for $5. Occasionally, the app is offered for free for a short period of time. I made sure to snag it for the students in my district while it was free. 

6. Logging in is easy.

If your students are playing online you can send them a link that is specific to your class. This will automatically fill in the star code for students (see image above). Then they simply type in their name and click play. If you would not like students to use their real names, type a username in the box labeled Child's first name when creating accounts. It is up to you if you would like to password protect accounts and can add that additional step to the login process if you like.

If your students are playing on a mobile device or tablet head to the setting that allows you to enable School Mode and set a star code. Learn how here. Once your star code is set students can login by simply typing their name. They can leave the password line blank if you have not chosen to setup passwords.

You can download your students' login information onto password cards to help them get started.

7. Students can play from home.

Teach Your Monster to Read has already prepared letters to send home to parents so kids can play from home. Attach the password card to the letter and have them log in like they do at school so accounts sync between school devices and their home devices. Read more here.

8. The Classroom Toolkit has great resources.

Head over to the Classroom Toolkit for more fun, digital and physical games and printable resources that you can use any time. These are great for introduction and intervention lessons. 

Digital resources include a sight word game, Monster Minigames for graphemes, digital flashcards, and animated songs for letter sounds.  Printables include grapheme and sight word bookmarks, posters, flashcards, playing cards, and certificates. You will find 3 physical phonics games with videos and printable resources and 10 tabletop phonics games with videos and printable resources.

9. There are freebie downloads.

In addition to the free downloads in the Classroom Toolkit you will also find downloadable files generated specifically for your class on your class homepage. Download a letter from your monster, certificates with your student names already filled in, and a "poster" where students can name their monsters and tell their likes and dislikes.

10. The help page will support you as you get started.

Get help with logins and passwords, mobile device and tablet apps, the computer version, and account management. Many of the help topics include videos for extra support. :)