Reading Unlocked Review – Homeschool Review Crew

I received a FREE 12 month subscription of this product through the HOMESCHOOL REVIEW CREW in exchange for my honest review. I was not required to write a positive review nor was I compensated in any other way.

There are many ways to teach your child to read, and many extra supplements out there to aid you on your child’s journey to reading and reading readiness. We received access to a 12 month subscription to Reading Unlocked, an online reading program that only takes a few minutes to complete each day. I tried this out with Bird, my 5 year old who is working on letter sounds and learning to sound out short 2-3 letter words.

So, here is what I like about this program. I like that it is still parent guided, even though it is an online curriculum supplement, it still requires the parent to sit with their child and walk them through the steps. This ensures your child is doing the work, doing it correctly and actually remembering those letter sounds and words. I like that the games and assignments are simple and repetitive, this really helped Bird to retain the information she had learned each day. I also really liked that at the most, this only took us about 10-15 minutes a day to complete. Her attention span, at age 5, is short-lived, so having a short timeline on this reading assignment was wonderful.

Here’s what I didn’t like so much. I love to be able to go back and see what areas my child struggled with when using programs like this, however with this program you can’t do that. You can go back to different levels and review or reset the level your child is working on, but I’d like to see a space for tracking what they did well on and what they need to work on. Now, not all states require this, as a matter of fact, our state does not, but we like to keep a record of work completed in a portfolio for each school year. So I would also like to be able to print a progress report of some sort to keep as a record of her completing this program’s assignments.

Here’s a screenshot (below) of one of Bird’s favorite tasks – this particular task she had to sound out the word and click on the picture that matched that word. Above the pictures you’ll see a line of dots, these are all the tasks your child has to finish to complete their daily assignment.

Overall, this was a great addition to what we were already using for reading comprehension, I wish we had a tablet to utilize it on, but our touchscreen laptop worked just fine for us. You can sign up for a free trial on Reading Unlocked’s website, and then it’s $24.99/month if you decide to keep working through the program. Lessons take approximately 10-15 minutes per day according to their website, though with Bird I would say closer to 20 minutes (but she has trouble focusing on tasks with her siblings working on other tasks).

Be sure to check out what other Homeschool Review Crew families though of Reading Unlocked by clicking the image below!