Hello all!

I’ve been trying to get my head around our new Reading Eggs app and learning how best to use it for Jellyfish class.

To give everybody more of a focus, I will be assigning three weekly activities for children to complete. New activities will go live each Monday and your child will have a week to complete them. The activities will cover a range of skills including spelling, phonics and story reading

If initially you feel the assignments are too easy for your child, please don’t worry. The idea is to get them confident using the app first and then the assignments will get progressively more challenging. Also the more your child uses the app, the more data this will generate for me and I can change assignments accordingly.

However, if your child finds the first assignments (not the placement test – see below) too challenging, please let me know and I will change it. I don’t want to put them off before they’ve even started!

Here is some advice on the different areas of Reading Eggs and how best to use it.

When you first login you will see a screen similar to the one below. Before you do anything on Reading Eggs children must complete a ‘Placement test’. This is a series of questions for children to answer WITHOUT ANY HELP, so the app can determine their reading age. Click on the central ‘My Lessons’ button to do this.

There is also a placement test when you click on ‘Spelling’. Please complete this next.

Once you have completed the placement tests, your child will be able to access the other areas along the top:

·         Storylands

·         Spelling

·         Driving Tests

·         Story Factory

Storylands is great for building confidence with reading. It gives pupils a series of activities that build up to reading a short story, to help them recognise and understand key words that will appear.

Spelling mainly focuses on words your child can decode with phonics, though the occasional sight word may appear.

Driving tests are great for helping children to recognise and spell common words (sight words and content words) but there is also a ‘letters and sounds’ option for phonics.

Story factory is a tool for children to write their own stories, with pictures to support. Here children can access stories that other children have written (on the left) and have a go at writing their own story (on the right).

The smaller buttons along the bottom are a range of games and puzzles. These are best to use as an incentive for completing the main activities. They can also be ‘locked out’ by the app if children aren’t completing their tasks.

 

If you are struggling with Reading Eggs or have any questions, please feel free to drop me an email and I will do my best to sort it.

Happy reading!