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📚 Reading apps and reading coaches · 🧸 Early learning (ages 2-6) · 🎮 Learning games and sites

Teach Your Monster to Read

By Teach Your Monster Ltd (The Usborne Foundation). Visit Teach Your Monster to Read

Desk research from the maker's own pages. Not yet tried by us. Checked 2026-10-24.

Teach Your Monster to Read is a phonics game from a UK charity linked to Usborne Publishing. A child creates a monster and teaches it to read, practicing letter sounds, blending, tricky words and, later, whole sentences. It has three stages that follow school phonics programs, and adults can track progress. It is free to play on computers through the website; the phone and tablet apps cost money.

Our take: A great free phonics game for preschool and kindergarten on a computer; older readers will outgrow it fast.

The facts
Ages it suitsabout 3-6 (early phonics)
What its terms say about ageAccounts are for adults: the site is meant to be used by teachers and parents or guardians as a teaching tool, and they set up child players. No minimum age is stated. (terms)
PriceFree, with paid extras. Free on computers through the website; the iPhone and iPad app is a paid download ($8.99 on the US App Store, Oct 2026).
Works onWeb, iPhone and iPad, Android
AccountA parent's account
AdsNone
In-app purchasesNone
The AI in itNo AI.

What's good

  • Free on computers
  • Charity-run with no ads
  • Follows school phonics order
  • Playful without being noisy

Watch for

  • App version costs money
  • British spellings and accents may confuse some US kids
  • Covers early phonics only

Data and privacy

Collects the adult's name and email and the child's first name or nickname plus game progress; it urges adults to use nicknames. It says it never sells data and that in-game messages are not ads. It follows UK GDPR. Read the privacy policy.

Does it work?

No independent study found; the maker cites a long-standing partnership with Roehampton University and says it has reached over 50 million children.

In the Big Index

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Where these facts come from

Prices, terms and features change. Nobody paid to be listed, nothing here is an affiliate link, and Peabody never rates itself. Where we and the maker disagree, the maker's own pages are the ones to trust.