We’ve been improving the Teach Your Monster to Read website to make it more useful for teachers and students. Here are some of the upgrades we’ve made this month:
Passwords:
You can now turn passwords off completely so children can log in using only their name. Just pop into your account settings to do this.
If you’re using auto-generated passwords, you can now choose to print out your passwords in capital or lowercase letters on password cards or in letters to parents.
Certificates, password cards and posters:
Password cards, certificates and posters can now be downloaded in bulk.
You can download posters and certificates for all your players, particular players or those in a group.
Progress reports:
Progress reports can now be downloaded for a whole group so you can compare the stats across a class.
Teacher to parent letter:
We have made sharing the game easier. Teachers can now easily edit a letter to parents. The letter contains login details for each of their students and can be printed in bulk.
We hope you find these new features useful – many of the changes have come out of conversations with our players.
Please get in touch if you have further suggestions, ideas or feedback about the website and game. We’d love to hear them!
The Teach Your Monster to Read team
Congratulations to Ashley Knight, the winner of the Teach Your Monster to Read Christmas colouring competition!
Ashley created the monster ‘Sprout’. Sprout wanted lots of books for Christmas – we think he’ll be happy with his book prize.
Here is Ashley with his winning picture.
The competition was judged by Teach Your Monster to Read illustrator Rich Wake,
Rich said:
“The winner for me is definitely Sprout by Ashley because I love the goggly eyes, pom-poms and glitter that have been added. Very creative and very Christmassy. Also the colouring in is really neat”.
Well done Ashley!
Here are some of the other fantastic entries into the competition. Thank you for sending through your monsters.
We’ve launched a fun and festive colouring in competition just in time for the holidays.
The winner will receive £50 of Usborne books.
How to enter.
Colour in this downloadable picture and email your entries to by 31st December 2014.
Rich Wake, the wonderful illustrator for Teach Your Monster to Read will judge the entries. We’re looking for the most colourful designs!
The team at Teach Your Monster to Read would like to wish all our players (monsters) a very merry christmas!
This colourful phonics activity was found on Jenae’s www.icanteachmychild.com resource site.
This activity is about sorting words that contain digraphs: /th/, /sh/and /ch/. It also includes decodable words like ‘that’ and ‘ship’ and tricky words like ‘the’ and ‘she’.
Find out how to create this phonics resource here at www.icanteachmychild.com
We’re proud to announce that Teach Your Monster to Read has reached 2 million game plays!
This is fantastic news for the Usborne Foundation because we know the game is helping more and more children learn to read.
Thank you to everyone who has played the game and we hope you’ll share this free online reading game with other parents and teachers.
Another simple, eye-catching phonics resource is the classroom phonics tree.
Thanks to Kirsten Baxter for the link on Pinterest:
http://www.pinterest.com/pin/296956169150714382
Monster Tip: You can create a ‘Tricky Word’ tree for your classroom too.
Download our Teach Your Monster to Read colouring in sheet and create your own monster at home. Download the file by clicking this link: Monster Printable.
We’d love to see your homemade monsters! Share them on our Facebook account.
This is a great starter for those children who are beginning their reading journey.
Create a phonics flip chart from a notebook and use it to help children sound out words.
For more information about this resource and others go to the Kids Activities Blog.
Reading is the key to a child’s future: it unlocks their potential and opens up a world filled with possibilities.
And for our poorest children reading well is their best route out of poverty: they do better at school, better in the workplace and are better placed to give their own children the best start in life.
However, every year in the UK, 130,000 children leave primary school not reading as well as they should. This figure includes 40% of all children from poorer backgrounds – a shockingly high proportion. (Figures from Save the Children’s report – Read On. Get On. How reading can help children escape poverty.)
This means over the next decade almost 1.5 million children will start secondary school already behind, and with likely consequences for their future.
Teach Your Monster to Read is one of the partners launching Read On. Get On. – a reading campaign driven by a coalition of organisations, communities, parents and schools, businesspeople, media and politicians. Organisations include Save the Children UK, Booktrust, The Reading Agency, Beanstalk, NAHT and National Literacy Trust.
Read On. Get On. is a campaign that will encourage all of us to play our part.
Everyone can do something – just ten minutes a day reading with a child makes a huge difference and helps them fall in love with reading. Children who don’t enjoy reading are ten times more likely to fall behind by the age 11.
We can’t afford to fail. Join us today.
For more information go to www.readongeton.org.uk and sign the petition to get politicians behind this campaign.
Thanks to this image on Stacey Adams Pinterest page and the fantastic Meaningful Mama blog for the idea of using bubble wrap as a phonics game.
It’s simple; add sticky labels containing target words or graphemes. Say the word out loud and ask children to find the words and if they get it right they can pop the bubble.
You can also try blending words together by adding letters to the bubble wrap and asking children to pop the right bubble to the corresponding sound.
It’s an easy game to set up and we know that lots of children love popping bubble wrap! Read how to set it up on the Meaningful Mama blog page.
