Sight Words Ninja - Slicing Game to Learn to Read

I know it’s only $1.99 but it is a waste of $$$. The only good thing about it is the concept. My child was totally into it. However, the app works by the narrator reading each word and the kid just slices the word. My child just swiped all the words as fast as she could. There was no word repetition or word grouping. This does not help a kid retain the info. Also, as another reviewer stated, you cannot turn words off without clicking each word or an ability to set the level of the “reader”. The only way we were able to make it work was to turn the sound off and I said my child could not swipe until they read the word correctly. This required me to be by their side the whole time. May as well just buy flash cards! Clearly this was not developed by an actual educator! Great concept but terrible execution.

I just downloaded this app to augment my pre-K daughter’s memorization of her sight words before kindergarten. I’m disappointed because the lists are quite limited and missing a large percentage of the words they need to know by the end of kinder. I am going to send a request to the developer to add the missing words for us. Better yet, I’d like to have the ability to add my own words! One more small annoyance, but real, is that the words are not in alphabetical order. This makes selecting individual words that you want your child to work on more cumbersome and time consuming than it needs to be. All told, it’s $2 bucks, so it did not break the bank...but it could be much better, with ease.

I like that I can choose which words I want my child to work on. My children like this app and it seems to be helping. The only thing I wish is that the word would be 100% visible all the time, what I mean by that is sometimes when the word comes up it is to far to the right or left that half or sometimes most of the word can’t be seen. Seeing the entire word and hearing the word is very important for my child to recognize it and reinforce what we have worked on with flash cards and reading. I would have given the app a 5 star rating if my child saw the entire words 100% of the time. Maybe an update will be able to fix this.