Good Stuff!

What We Liked:

I really like that Montessori Crosswords has both pre-selected levels of difficulty that increase, as well as detailed lists of words that you can use to really focus in on phonograms you’re currently teaching or any trouble sounds that need extra reinforcement.

Montessori Crosswords also keeps vowel teams together in the empty white squares, helping children to understand how two vowels or two consonants come together to form single sounds. When those empty spaces are tapped both of them highlight in white together to show their connection as a single sound unit (I love this). The letters also change in the phonics alphabet beneath the crossword to make the sound their combination of letters makes.

There still aren’t many apps that do phonics well in the App Store, and Montessori Crosswords is really one of the best. It is filled with options (love that it includes cursive letters) and is easy to ramp up and down in difficulty. My eight-year-old also really enjoys Montessori Crosswords, she loves the animated reward screen (my five-year-old is harder to engage with literacy-oriented apps).

The phonics enabled moveable alphabet can even be used to teach simple blending, segmenting and early reading skills for kindergarteners (short consonant and vowel sounds only). I like to tap each letter in a row to show how the individual letters make single sounds that then combine to form a word. You can even overlap the letters slightly to simulate true cursive joins.

What We Didn’t Like:

The phonics sound for ‘q’ sounds more like ‘k’ than it does like ‘kw’ which is how we teach it. When in crossword mode, the letters in the intersecting squares don’t always make the sound you expect them to. For example if the words pencil and cup align on the ‘c’, it makes the sound ‘ssss’ instead of ‘cccc’, the letter in the alphabet also makes the ‘sss’ sound, so while it lines up for pencil, it doesn’t line up well for cup. There are also a few cases where letters aren’t making quite the right sound – the ‘i’ in pencil says ‘uh’ for example. The cursive alphabet is European style letter formation as opposed to North American.

Overall:

Montessori Crosswords is one of my most often recommended apps to parents teaching with phonics. The flexible lists and many options of this app make it a great choice for both beginning and emerging readers and spellers. This is a good one, if you are teaching with phonics you should definitely check it out!

I received a promo code.

Appsforhomeschooling.com about Montessori Crosswords for Kids, v3.5