After starting my own online reading program to teach children to read, naturally I was always curious about other reading programs and how they compared to what we offer at Sight and Sound Reading. As you may know, I have five children, currently ages 9,7,5, 3 and 1, and I often hear advertisements for ABCmouse.com
. With this in mind, I contacted ABCmouse.com and asked if I could review their program. Thankfully they agreed and allowed me and my children to have access to their site so that I could review their program and share it with you. Today I will not only give you my ABC Mouse review but also the ABC Mouse Reviews from my children! Not only will you get a reading teacher’s perspective but also kid-tested reviews as well.
ABC Mouse Reviews
First I will do my ABC Mouse Review. First to state the obvious. ABC Mouse is an animated program and our free online reading program is taught through youtube videos and worksheets. We do not have the resources to be able to animate our program, but we have not found it to be necessary. We find little ones love to watch Mrs. Karle and we receive wonderful reviews and feedback of how we help little ones learn to read. ABCmouse.com has interactive nline books and games to original songs, puzzles, art activities, and printables. There are activities to
- Help your child learn reading, phonics, and math in a fully interactive environment.
- Help your child develop a love of learning at an early age.
- Help your child gain essential learning skills that will last a lifetime.
- Build your child’s educational foundation before entering school.
- Prepare your child with these essential reading and math skills to succeed in school.
- Give your child an educational head start before entering school.
- Allow your child to learn at his or her own pace.
On the reading side of the site, ABCmouse.com helps children to quickly learn the letters of the alphabet and their sounds, practice sight words, follow along and listen to fables, fairy tales, and nonfiction books. Children learn and practice uppercase and lowercase letters, phonics (letter sounds), rhyming words and word families.
Besides reading, abcmouse.com offers math: ABCmouse.com teaches numbers, shapes, patterns, and measurements. The site’s games and creative activities make math fun while giving young learners the practice they need to build a strong foundation for success.
The math curriculum includes: recognizing and counting numbers 1-100, “More than” and “Less than”, identifying as well as drawing shapes and simple patters, and the meaning of addition and subtraction.
ABCmouse.com also offers social studies, science, and health including the body and health, sports, plants and animals, weather and the seasons, and the earth, moon, sun and stars.
Lastly ABCmouse.com has an art and coloring section where children can use lines, shapes, and colors to create original works of art. Games, books, paint-by-number activities, and puzzles teach children to name and use a variety of colors. Children learn primary and secondary colors, shades of colors, paint-by-number activities, and number and letter dot-to-dots.
ABCmouse.com is a fantastic online environment to help little ones practice beginning reading and math skills. It does not explicitly teach a child to read. That is where our online reading program and ABCmouse differ. We explicitly teach the students and offer word for word teaching reading book on how to teach a child to read. With abcmouse, they offer fantastic resources for a child to practice what they learn. They are great for a child to learn and practice alphabet letters and sounds. They are fun interactive practice of early sight words and skills. They are great for helping your child listen to online stories, practicing letter writing.
It is not just for pre-school and kindergarten age children. There are also harder skills like blending and vowel sounds that were great for my first grader. There is an amazing amount of fantastic resources to help a child using ABCmouse. It is actually quite impressive. The children all absolutely LOVE abcmouse. They voluntarily choose to go to it during their free computer time. They can go anywhere (well, within reason – you know what I mean!) on the web during screen time..and more often than not, they are on abcmouse. It is extremely interactive. The children have a learning path that they walk you through and the children love to do the things that will take them to the next step in their journey.
As I said before, abcmouse does not explicitly teach your child to read. Do not get it and think you can put your child on it and they will learn how to read. ABCmouse.com is fantastic for practicing skills to help a child read. If it were me, and this is how I do with my own children, I teach my child to read using our free online program or our teaching reading book, (or have them learn to read at school), and then use abcmouse and an awesome supplement to help children get excited about learning and reading and help your child gain confidence with reading.
As you may know, I say it all the time, a child who is confident with reading likes to read. A child who does not feel confident does not like to read and struggles with reading. ABCmouse.com is a great way for children to practice those skills. There are literally thousands of interactive resources on their site and I highly recommend it for any beginning reader (preschool-kindergarten-first grade).Now, for my children’s ABC Mouse Reviews. I asked my five year old why he likes ABCmouse.com
. He said he likes “playing the games and singing.” When I asked if there was anything else he liked, he said “coloring, doing different things that are so good, tracing his name”. When I asked my first grader what she liked about it, she said she liked to “do the puzzles and write letters and sound out words”. (She is my child that struggles with phonics so it is nice to hear her say she likes to practice it!). When I asked my 3 year old, he said he likes “the songs and coloring”.
The nice thing about ABCmouse.com is that you can try it for free and see for yourself! I definitely would recommend it to anyone who asked me their opinion. The children love to use it, and it great for reinforcing skills. Kid tested, mother (and reading teacher approved!) (Click on the picture below to try it free for 30 days!)
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I have a love/hate relationship with abcmouse. At first my daughter was really into but now she doesn’t like doing anything on the learning path because it always has puzzles…she is so bored of the puzzles…I wish and have requested other ways to reinforce learning on the path. Now she only wants to play the games and try to get prizes. She is still kinda learning but not enjoying it too much.
Thank you so much for leaving your thoughts on ABC Mouse too! Yes, I agree… once they start playing computer games to learn, it can be hard to entice them to learn other ways, so that is a concern. One way I try to get around this is using abcmouse as a reward after learning… (But, you probably do this too -you definitely make an excellent point!)
DD5 loves ABCmouse. I let her use the site 2 or 3 times a week for about an hour so I can get some 1:1 homeschool time with older DS. DD feels like she is a big girl gitteng to learn on her own. I don’t really see this is a full K curriculum, but she is picking up a few things. The content is basic but it’s safe to let her use it on her own and it holds her attention.
Yeah, definitely agree…the kids love it…it is definitely not a full curriculum/explicitly teaching kids to read…but it certainly helps them practice skills and makes learning fun. Thanks for your comments!
I have 3 kids, 2, 4 and 7. I start using ABC Mouse because they daycare my kids went were using it, and I though it should be good for learning. At the beginning they use it for approximately 1 month, because we mention them that if they want to use the tablet, it can be only on ABC Mouse. We thought that if they want the tablet to use it with a program that they learn something.
That was our mistake, they don’t enjoy the app, none of them. After a month of use, they don’t want to even open the app or they start crying. They prefer PBS Kids or other learning apps, but they don’t want to be on ABC Mouse at all.
I didn’t want to resign on the learning app and I keep my subscription for several years to try on different ages if they want to go back to the app. And every time they like the app less and less.
I tried to cancel the contract and I got the reply from ABC Mouse support with their terms and conditions.
I will try some other apps like Sago Mini or Playkids and keep working with PBS Kids. With those I got better success and if the kids are in a good mood, they play and learn, instead of going to ABC Mouse, that they don’t like it. The app didn’t work for my kids.
Thank you for your thoughts! We had a totally different experience (as I noted in the post) – my kids preferred ABC Mouse much more than Reading Eggs. I did not require that they only go on ABC Mouse though…they could also do other things. I may require a portion of their day spent on ABC Mouse -but then at other times during the day they could do other things so that they would not tire from it. My kids do like PBS Kids and we like the Leap Frog Letter Factory/Amazing Alphabet/Numbers Ahoy if they are doing a movie for screen time. Anyway, thanks for your feedback! Every little learner is different and I like hearing other people’s experiences.
Has anyone tried Hooked on Phonics?
Hi there, Yes, we have tried Hooked on Phonics years ago and we do NOT endorse the program.