Reading is an essential skill that every child needs to master in order to succeed in their academic and professional careers. But unfortunately, one in four children in America grow up without learning how to read, and many others enter adulthood with poor reading skills.

Fortunately, there are a number of tools that parents can use to help their children improve their reading skills. In fact, help is now available at your child’s fingertips thanks to apps that are designed to teach children crucial reading skills. Here’s what parents should know about the best apps to teach reading:

What Are the Six Basic Reading Skills?

Some apps are only designed to teach kids certain reading skills, but it’s important to find an app that will help a child improve all crucial reading skills. The six basic reading skills that every child needs to develop are:

• Decoding: This is a child’s ability to sound out words that they are not familiar with. To decode a word, a child must be familiar with the different sounds that each letter in the alphabet makes.  
• Fluency: This is the skill of being able to read quickly without making any errors. To master this skill, kids must be able to decode and read words rapidly. 
• Vocabulary: Having a broad vocabulary will help kids understand more of what they are reading. Most kids broaden their vocabularies through everyday experiences and conversations with others.
• Sentence Construction and Cohesion: This is the skill of understanding how sentences are built and how two or more sentences can connect ideas and build meaning.
• Reasoning and Background Knowledge: Kids should be able to relate what they are reading to their own experiences in order to read between the lines and fully understand the text.
• Working Memory and Attention: Kids need to be able to take in information and hold onto it in order to extract meaning from the text. To master this skill, kids must know how to self-monitor, which means they must recognize when they don’t know what a word or sentence means.

The best reading apps will help a child improve all six of these skills so they can become stronger, well-rounded readers.

What is the Best App to Teach A Child to Read?

There are many apps that claim to teach a child how to read, but none that can compare to Readability. The Readability app sets itself apart with these unique features:

• Responsive speech recognition technology: The app will read a passage to your child then ask your child to read the passage back. Using responsive speech recognition technology, the app will listen and identify errors as your child reads. 
• Real-time correction: The app will instantly correct your child’s pronunciation errors as they read aloud so they can learn from their mistakes.
• Interactive questions and answers: The voice-based interactive Q&A feature will keep your child engaged by asking them questions about the text they are reading and listening to their answers. Talking to the app is just like talking to a tutor thanks to this innovative feature.
• Parent dashboard: Parents can track their child’s progress using the app’s dashboard, which measures your child’s accuracy, comprehension, and daily time spent reading.

These are some of the features that make Readability the best app for children who are struggling readers. By using this app regularly, kids can drastically improve their reading skills.

How Can I Help My Child Learn to Read?

Kids can work on their reading skills independently using the Readability app, but there are some things that parents can do to supplement this instruction. Here are simple ways that parents can help children improve their reading skills:

• Talk to them—a lot. Talking to your kids will expose them to a wider range of words and sentence structures so they can build their vocabulary and develop stronger sentence construction skills.
• Ask them to tell you a story. Ask your child to tell you about a specific event in their life or make up a story. 
• Make reading a priority. Practice makes perfect, so encourage your child to read on a daily basis. If your child isn’t motivated to read, you should practice what you preach by reading every day so you can lead by example.
• Have resources available. Make sure you have magazines, books, newspapers, and other reading materials available in your home at all times.

By following these simple tips, parents can do their part to help their children improve their reading skills.

Download the Readability App Today

Take the first step toward helping your child become a better reader by downloading the Readability app on your smartphone or tablet today. Start your free 7-day trial and watch as your child becomes a more confident, proficient reader!