Quick Read
One book. Pick who is listening, deal the pages out, one thing hidden inside, and the last page belongs to the child alone.
The Adventure
The child reads because the crew is stuck on page four.
Not “read this and you’ll get a star”. The crew cannot get the dog down from the gum tree until somebody reads what the moggie said — and they’re the only one in the room who knows the sounds.
Digger LandingSomething silly, together.u · f
Boogie Board RidgeTen seconds of moving.r · l
Kelpie RestNotice one thing.ck · h
GiveGive someone a turn.e · b
Nothing here is sent anywhere and nothing is saved. This is the same map the app draws, from the same rules — a name, a stage and a few things they like.
Every place on the island is a sound.
Reading does not open new ground, because finishing a story cannot teach a child a sound, and a map that pretended otherwise would be a progress bar wearing phonics as a costume. What reading does is light up the ground already under their feet.
A turn
Roll, move, land on a sound
Who, where, and what goes wrong. In the app it rolls your own child's dog and your own Nan; here it lands on a sample book you can read straight away.
- 01
Roll
One to three. An island of six open sounds and a roll of six is a boat going in circles.
- 02
Move
Only through ground they have already opened. A board game must never sail a child onto a sound nobody has taught them.
- 03
Land on a sound
The coast deals a card — silly, moving, noticing or giving — and the grown-up reads it out.
- 04
And that sound is tonight’s book
The board picks the book. Nothing else in this category does that, and it is only possible because the map is made of phonics.
WhoThe dogWhereOut the backWhatLostHowever they land is the story. That is rather the point.
The four coasts
What a card asks for
- Play
- Silly, fast, together. Say a word in the daftest voice in the house; both of you pull the same face.
- Move
- Ten seconds of moving between pages. Every card is written twice — standing up, and from the couch — and the seated one is written to be just as good, not a consolation prize.
- Notice
- Name one thing you can read now that you could not last term. Small, specific, never sappy.
- Give
- Read this page to somebody else in the house. Whoever has read least tonight reads the next one.
- And no clock
- It ends when the book ends. A classroom version budgets itself to the bell; bedtime already has a natural budget, and a countdown on a screen a child can see is the one thing we said we would never put there.
Three ways to play
Pick the night you’re actually having
Most nights are the first one.
Family Quest
Roll the story. Draw a card between the pages. Something is after the picnic and the whole crew is working against it. Ends on time whatever happens.
All Together
One book, many heroes. A class on a projector, or Nan on the link and cousins on the iPad. Nobody is scored and nobody loses.
One card between every couple of pages, read out by the grown-up — the child’s reading stays inside the book, where every word has been checked.
“Read the next page like a robot.”
Changes how, never whether.
“Everyone be a magpie for ten seconds.”
The bit that gets a wriggly five-year-old to sit back down.
“What do you reckon the dog does next?”
Dialogic reading. Worth about eight months of vocabulary.
“Find a word with sh on this page.”
Only ever sounds they have been taught.
“Swap the dog’s name for a body part. Again.”
Deployed strategically.
What we will never build
Most reading apps have all of these. We have read the evidence on each one and decided against it, and we would rather say so out loud than be quietly different.
- Coins, eggs, gems or any currency. The shop becomes the product.
- An arcade unlocked by reading. It tells a child the reading was the price of the fun.
- Mystery boxes, chests or spins. Chance-based rewards are M-rated in this country now, and rightly.
- Streaks or “come back tomorrow”. A five-year-old should not owe an app anything.
- Leaderboards or class rankings. At this age, losing simply stops children playing — and it is the struggling reader who would be at the bottom.
- Praise for a wrong answer. Children notice, and then they stop believing the praise that was real.
- A timer on any screen a child can see.
Across 128 experiments, promising children something for reading measurably reduced how much they chose to read afterwards. The one reward that did not backfire was more reading. So the reward is more reading.
It has to work without the screen
The map folds out to A3, the deck prints on a perforated sheet, the dice are a net you cut out, and the passport takes a stamp off the back cover of every book you print.