Sky Fish Phonics is the first phonics app both my kindergartner and I love. It feels like a fast-paced video game with sharks to dodge and CVC words to decode. First you choose a fish to represent yourself, then you begin a journey through the sky, shooting from pod to pod avoiding the poisonous sharks. As you go you have the opportunity to collect new costumes and to rack up points by collecting stars. Every so often you also have to answer a multiple choice phonics question to advance to the next pod. For example, change "jet" into "net." JET -> _ET with the choice of three letters you can click on to hear their sounds.
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| Costumes include shark, princess, cowboy, ninja, and more. |
The game is smart, in that it adjusts to the student's level of play. The level of the phonics questions adjusts depending on how many you get correct at each level; and there is a Progress Dashboard for monitoring how a child is doing. While Brooklyn's phonic skills are quite good, her executive functioning skills (impulse control, attention and
planning) are not as good. When she gets frustrated with this game, it is usually because her fish gets fried in a trap. But the rewards are worth it.
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| An early level |
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| A middle level |
She reports that "It's fun because you might get shot, and then you
have to start over. But you might get costumes, and sometimes it's the
costumes you already have, but sometimes it's your favorite costume."
When asked about the reading part of the game, she answered that she
"just knows how to do that," because "she's in kindergarten."
We love almost everything about this game. I think the practice with executive functions and dealing with frustrations is just as valuable for Brooklyn as the phonics work. I hope in the future that the app developer releases more advanced levels with blends and digraphs to decode and substitute.
