Reading Kingdom ~ Review
Last year we received a subscription to Reading Kingdom for one of our children as part of the Schoolhouse Review Crew. So when we had the opportunity to review it again this year I was so excited!
Disclosure: I received a free copy of this product for review, all opinions are 100% my own.
What We Received
1-year subscriptions to Reading Kingdom for 3 children
What is it?
Reading Kingdom is an online learning program and game developed by Dr. Marion Bank a director of the Light on Literacy program at Columbia University.
You can read more about her career in teaching children to read here.
Reading Kingdom is intended for children ages 4 to 10 years or struggling readers. Reading Kingdom also recommends itself to children on the Autism spectrum, ADD or dyslexia. When they have completed the program they will be reading at the 3rd-grade level.
What Do We Think?
We’ve been using this program with our three daughters ages 9, 7, and 5. When a child first starts the program it begins with a skills assessment test.
This test is VERY long and while my 6-year-old daughter enjoyed it my newly turned 5-year-old was starting to get frustrated with it. The skill assessment starts out stressing to the parents that you are NOT to help your children with the lessons other than to provide help using the mouse or keyboard if needed.
However, you are not to provide any answers for them. The goal is to see exactly where each child is in their skills of typing, spelling, and reading. After completing these tests the child is placed at the appropriate level in the Reading Kingdom program.
I really like that instead of all children starting out at the very beginning, that each child can start out just where they are at in their knowledge. I do wish the test wasn’t quite so long in the very beginning though.
With the Reading Kingdom program, you have the option of using your computer's keyboard or an on-screen keyboard. Most of my children prefer to use the computer keyboard.
We have had a few issues when for some odd reason the program won’t recognize the computer’s keyboard and restarting the computer doesn’t fix this problem. This is when we switch to the on-screen keyboard instead. We have had this issue on 3 different computers.
I don’t know what causes it, but often later in the day, it will start working normally again.
The Reading Kingdom lessons are very short and we like how they show how many more questions are coming. This helps to motivate children to keep going. Although I find our children enjoy the program so much they want to do more than one lesson a day.
If they do get tired they can stop at any time and the program picks up exactly where it left off when they log back in.
Reading Kingdom follows a very similar pattern for its lessons. A word is shown and said, then the child has to click on the letters in order from a long line of displayed letters. If they have trouble the program will give them help.
If they have trouble with a word, then the program will focus on practicing that word for a while. The word will be shown and said, then they have to click on it when it is displayed in a group of other words. Then they will practice building and writing the word.
I have to say our children just love the Reading Kingdom program and one thing I’ve noticed is that after starting this program our 7 and 6-year-olds started writing more often and more creatively.
I noticed this last year with our now 9-year-old as well! I really do like that it is easy to use, online and independent learning tool for them to use. There are no ads or pop-ups that I have to worry about.
