Endless Reader

What Endless Reader covers for early readers

Endless Reader is presented as the follow-up to Endless Alphabet, and it is aimed at young children who are starting to read. Its subject is sight words: the words that appear most often in school texts, library books and picture books. The app is rated PEGI 3.

Sight words are hard to decode because many have irregular spelling, so phonics does not help with them. They also rarely have a picture that hints at the meaning. The app handles them as whole words, using the Endless monsters to make each one memorable.

Letter puzzles for learning sight word spelling

Each word comes with an interactive word puzzle built from its letters, which come to life on screen. A child works through the puzzle to assemble the word, which practises recognising its spelling as a whole.

Words are bought inside the app, and the listing says the device must be online with enough free disk space to get every word a user has purchased.

Sentence puzzles that show word meaning

After the letter puzzle, each word appears in a sentence puzzle where the words themselves become what they describe. The listing's examples are "dog", which appears as a barking dog, and "up", which reaches for the sky.

The sentence puzzles show how a word is used in context, so a child sees the word's meaning and usage, not only its spelling.

How the letter and sentence puzzles work together

Each sight word goes through both puzzle types in turn. The letter puzzle covers the spelling, and the sentence puzzle covers the meaning and usage. Together they give a child a fixed set of common words that appear in the books they read at school and at home.