Welcome to Making Monster Magic, where we take you behind the scenes at Teach Your Monster! We are working on a next-generation version of our flagship phonics game, Teach Your Monster to Read, and every month we’ll bring you behind the curtain and show you what we’re working on, how we approach it and why we’re doing it.

In this edition, we’ll discuss why we decided to include the US curriculum and accent in the new version of the game, and how we will implement it.

Why did we decide to include US?

Over the past 14 years, one request has come up more than any other: the option to switch Teach Your Monster to Read to a US accent. Phonemes are pronounced quite differently in US and UK English, and many American users told us their kids and students struggled with certain sounds as a result.

With over 60% of our users based in the US, and our mission to make a positive global impact on children’s reading, we knew it was time to bring US English into the game.

So why hasn’t it happened sooner? We built the original game around UK pedagogy. Our UK expert, Angela Colvert of the University of Roehampton, pronounced the phonemes, so we knew they were accurate for our UK users. But that UK approach was so deeply embedded in the structure of the legacy version (as we’re now calling the original game) that we were unable to add US English as a new option.The new version of Teach Your Monster to Read is different. It has been built to support any language, and after we’ve launched UK English, we’re moving swiftly onto bringing in US English. And we’ve gone further than an accent switch: we’ve worked with US educational expert Dr Alyssa O’Rourke to develop the game with the US curriculum firmly embedded from the ground up.

How do we begin to understand what our US players need?

While Teach Your Monster is a UK company, our mission to help children read has always been a global one. In 2012, we worked with experts from the University of Roehampton to build the UK pedagogy into the legacy game. Over the last 14 years, this has given us a wealth of knowledge in creating games that support learning, but to give our young US readers the best start, we needed to bring in a US literacy expert.

Dr Alyssa O’Rourke (introduced in Making Monster Magic 3) is currently a fellow at the Science of Reading Center at SUNY New Paltz. With more than 30 years of research and applied experience, she has held a variety of educational roles, bringing deep expertise in literacy, educational assessment, learning disabilities, and applied child development.

Since the beginning of the project, Alyssa has helped build the US pedagogical framework alongside our team and has been a crucial part of feeding back into our iterative development process. She has also worked on the correct pronunciation of the phonemes in the game so kids in the US hear sounds that match how they are delivered there, and overall, a game that is better aligned with how they pronounce phonemes and learn to read. 

Alongside our work with Alyssa, researching the latest approaches to learning to read, such as the Science of Reading, has been essential to our game development. Our team has also worked with teachers and parents in the US to ensure we meet the needs and expectations of our US users, allowing them to test our prototype games and, again, providing valuable feedback to help us keep improving the game and learning experience.

What did we learn from our US expert?

US schools are increasingly adopting literacy programs aligned with the Science of Reading. Exploring the research behind these changes gave us insight into the structure and key elements of these programs that improve literacy outcomes, as well as the use of well-used curricula such as UFLI.

💡 The UFLI (University of Florida Literacy Institute) program, specifically known as UFLI Foundations, is an explicit, systematic, and research-based foundational reading curriculum designed to teach children how to read and spell.

We then worked closely with our US expert to make sure the game’s scope and sequence (a foundational curriculum planning document that defines the “what” and the “when” of an educational program or course) reflected this approach and complemented the reading programs children already used in class. 

Along the way, we discovered several differences from the UK approach:

• Tricky words: Often called “heart words” in the US, these high-frequency words are introduced much earlier in the learning-to-read journey.
• Nasalised sounds: The nasalised ‘a’ is taught as a separate GPC in the US scope and sequence because of how the short a sound changes slightly when it is followed by an n or an m.
• Vocabulary focus: US programs place a strong emphasis on oral language and oral language and vocabulary development, particularly multiple-meaning words. For example, helping children to understand how one word can have many different meanings, like how ‘jam’ can be food and also bad traffic!
• Spelling, pronunciation, and word choice differences: There are many differences in Spelling, like cozy (US) and cosy (UK); Pronunciation, such as ‘mum’ (UK) and mom (US); and Word Choice, like ‘sweater’ (US) and jumper (UK).

These insights have shaped our game to be adaptable to both UK and US frameworks.

💡 Tricky words are high-frequency words that require special attention because they contain at least one part that is irregular (the sounds required don’t match the regular GPCs) or that hasn’t yet been learned.

What are our plans to include both UK and US in one game?

Once we are able to include the US scope and sequence, we plan to add an option to select the UK or US framework during level selection, right at the beginning of the game. This means that the rest of the gameplay will continue in the chosen framework.

When will the US English accent and US curriculum be in the game?

The replacement game will be launched with the UK Scope and Sequence only. 

This is to ensure the game runs smoothly first. Since we’ve only used the UK scheme in the legacy game, we want to ensure all our t’s are crossed and i’s are dotted with the US Scope and Sequence, so we’ll release this in a future update, AFTER the initial launch. We have worked closely with our US expert to ensure that the UK framework remains an effective practice tool to support reading instruction in the UK, the US, and beyond.

We’ll definitely be shouting all about it once the US Scope and Sequence is ready, so keep an eye on our emails and socials for that. 

With the game’s new capabilities, we also hope to expand our reach to more languages and accents in the future, helping more kids around the world to read in English!

What are we working on right now?

We’re working on so many different aspects of the game currently, but in future posts, we’ll be touching on some of the work that goes into making this game a fun, valuable learning tool, including…

• Responding to feedback from User testing and improving gameplay.
• Adding in the VO – check out our article to find out who we got for the narrator…!
• More technical user experience improvements, like stats and logging in!

We want to hear from you!

As we’ll be discussing in future posts, you are fundamental to how we develop and improve our games. We want to hear from you. How do you feel about this update? Any must-haves you believe should be included in the new Teach Your Monster to Read? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Please let us know what you think via this Google form, and we’ll read every response.

Thank you for being part of the journey

Existing users of Teach Your Monster to Read will get free of charge access to the new version of Teach Your Monster to Read. For more information about the new app, we have a new Frequently Asked Questions section in our help pages which you can visit. It will answer most questions about the new update and give you all the information of what we know so far.

More updates soon 💜