I rarely write reviews, but I just had to give my testimony for this one Lol. After teaching my 4 year old twins all of the letters and letter sounds, I was unfortunately really struggling to teach them how to read actual words. I tried three paid subscriptions, “teach my monster to read,” “hooked on phonics,” and “abc mouse,” and although each app was useful in it’s own way, I had to spend so much time sitting down with them to go through all of those lessons and games with them. And in our family, we have story time, and every day the boys color, draw, and practice writing. So, when we were going through the paid apps, it was always quite a hassle and time consuming to skip the stories and coloring portion of them. It was nearly impossible for me to do this with EACH of them, take care of my baby girl, and maintain the rest of my household responsibilities.But, THIS APP is just incredible. The lessons on Duo are straightforward with clear instructions, and it’s nothing like other apps I’ve tried that had too many game components and were very much overstimulating for my children. My boys insist on completing their reading lessons without my help, but they always say “look mommy, I’m getting another star!” once they finish one. My boys started off with 1 lesson a day, but they love earning stars (and my praise and rewards once they complete a star) so much that they are completing 5-10 lessons a day. They actually come to me and say “mommy can I do my school please?!” I can’t give this app enough praise. It keeps their attention, each lesson is the perfect length. I honestly don’t know how I would be teaching both of them to read without it, so, I just wanted to say a big thank you to all of the creators of this app.

I am a Senior at Graceland University (GU) and am close to graduating in the school of Education there. I greatly approve of what you have created. Repetition of letter names and speaking to the child who’s playing the “games” lines up perfectly with what I have learned at GU. As does the fact there is close to no distractions from the learning even between the game stages.That said, what I would change in the app is create a way to control the settings to a greater extent, such as see the statistics and get progress monitoring by accessing the app in some way. I would say this to better keep parents, and maybe even teachers, better informed. If you were to do so, maybe also add a way to specify which as well so that it could better integrate into classroom use.The other change I would make would be to allow for different languages to speak the instruction and for the verbal components when learning English. This would also be a means of introducing English to ESL, ELL and maybe even bilingual children.

We absolutely love the app for our 3.5 year old. Using this app in addition to our other letter and language studies - and with adult supervision and conversation throughout - has been an excellent tool that she’s excited about. The only complaint I have is that there is a ton of content about sugar, snacks, and cookies. We don’t talk about these things or use these words in our home; so now for our daughter to be demanding cookies and lollipops every time we leave the house is a bit disheartening. I would also love an option to choose how many sounds/celebrations there are for correct answers. I use the DuoLingo app as an adult for learning a language, and have turned off the sounds for correct answers. I would love this option for my toddler….. we’re living in a time when it’s already so difficult to combat the overwhelming advertising and misinformation about what is healthy food for our bodies, and also combating social media addiction and dopamine addiction and overload. I do love the app and and our child does too, but I worry about the constant snack and sugar references and too many dopamine hits along the way. It’s all quite addictive.

My son has struggled so much in school. He has learning disabilities and most apps frustrated him and I’ve tried so many. I have used Duolingo for a year now for learning Korean and he would look over my shoulders and play along. One day I saw Duolingo had children's apps and I downloaded them and I can’t tell you how much he loves these apps! The stories are cute and entertaining. They go over sight words and letters (I hope there are more times that bd, pq, mw are put together because he also has trouble seeing the difference.)I can’t wait to see what the higher levels will teach him. I love the fact that he’s not frustrated but learning. He’s 9 and we began at level 1 and are going to keep moving forward. Already he’s seen great progress. Please keep updating it. I have watched a kid who hates to learn to begin to have pride in himself and look forward to learning. You guys rock! If it was possible to rate higher than 5 stars, I would do it!!!!!

I can’t speak for the rest of the world or what entertains children these days, however I can say that my son loves this app. We do ten levels together every day. I refuse to give him the answer but will help him phonetically to encourage recall. This app kindled a love for reading that I could not create. He is spelling, sounding out and recognizing words and phrases on signs when we go into town.I highly recommend this app.The content is appealing and presented with care. I haven’t encountered a context or narrative that I dislike. Currently we are on location/level 7.The levels become more complicated and demanding as you progress. At 4.5 yo my son fully understands the concepts being taught and did not have to replay any sequence of levels. There is a reasonable pass/fail requirement which off hand seems to be about 70% correct to pass.It takes him ~15-20 minutes to complete his daily work (M-F).If you can spare 15 minutes to sit and do this app enjoyable with your child it will pay Massive dividends.P.S. Please add tests(with analysis) after each location. Additionally, being able to turn on the “speak” function after completing a location would be nice. My tertiary and finally wish is that you would just slightly expand the number of “mini games”. The slime time, cart racing, fish, and cooking “mini games” get repetitive just a little. I occasionally have to reel his attention back in.Again for an education app I’d give it ten stars if I could. It is not an entertainment app and should not be.

I have a young family member that struggles with reading and phonics, this has been the only thing that's really got her excited about reading and learning in general. To top it off it's actually free to use. You can have multiple child accounts so if you have multiple kids they can take turns. The only thing I will say is that sometimes it allows your child to guess the right answer and they can guess all the wrong answers up until the ending which I've caught my cousin doing a couple times, aside from that this is really good. There's a lot of repetition, follow along mini reading books, quizzes at the end, they have you drag the letter to the correct spot for spelling, they have you practice writing the letters. This was well made and even I have fun playing it with her.

He’s been struggling to learn his letters for years, we tried teaching him, using videos, and apps and he just would not sit down and was not interested. With this app (and the help of his teachers) he has finally started understanding letters and sounds. He actually WANTS to sit down and open this app. With the iPad and the Apple pencil, he has been learning how to WRITE and I am so amazed at how fast this app has helped him. My only suggestion would be allowing other languages on here. We are in a hispanic household and the primary language he speaks is spanish, his teachers and parents talk to him in this language, I see him struggling a bit to switch from spanish to english, especially in the first couple minutes on the app. It would be nice if he could learn the alphabet in spanish with this app. It’s still an amazing app, definitely 5 stars!!!

Tl;dr this app used to be better, but they’ve made it too easy to pass levels so kids can trapped at higher levels knowing too little and the Stories section is so addictive they won’t even do the modules to learn their letters.We found DuoABC about three years ago when my daughter was 2. She showed interest and began learning her letters decently. I was a little concerned with how easily she passed certain levels but it was forcing her to repeat enough that she was still learning.I forget when, but they added a new stories section where kids can go to a library and read through books. Once this section was added, my daughter would no longer do any of the letter based modules. She would only read the stories and do the joke section over and over. I had to babysit her to go through the modules where she actually learned something.I tried again with my son who is now three. I would babysit him to make sure he didn’t just do stories, but it seemed like he progressed through the letter modules even more easily with less forced repetition. He shows radically less understanding of letters. When he finally reached a point where he was stumped and couldn’t get enough to move on, he also didn’t understand how he could go back to actually *learn* those sections he’d already passed but not mastered. He needed to be challenged more to get the right answers earlier and now is at an impasse that leaves him frustrated. This requires my intervention so much that we have switched to a different learning system altogether.

I’ve let two little ones use this (5 & 7), and I’m a bit mixed on how I feel about it. The speaking exercises are incredibly inconsistent. For the 5 y/o, it’s expected that he should be able to immediately read and say a word that appears on the screen. The app immediately begins to listen for a response instead of allowing time to sound it out. It also accepts whatever noise it detects, even if it’s completely wrong. For the 7 y/o, it reads a sentence to him and wants him to repeat it. Not only is this not practicing reading AT ALL, but it again can’t properly depict what he’s saying and often proceeds halfway through a sentence. I tried to turn the volume down and let him actually sound it out, but since it expects immediate and perfect response, it kept marking it wrong and proceeding before he could get three words out! This is my biggest complaint by far because it makes the app fairly useless.

Amazing app that my kids have been using for nearly a year now. It does a fantastic job teaching recognition by sight and sound and writing as well, but the updates -while great- removed some wonderful features. Two of which were extremely important to my kids’ usage.1) Removed stars that tracked daily usage, which was fantastic for keeping the kids engaged daily.2) Removed the ability to see what each level’s focus is. This is the biggest issue because now it’s impossible to go back and redo specific lessons like writing or a sight-word or just the sounds of a letter, etc. Now if you want to relearn an alphabet or sight-word or practice writing, you have to check each levels’s contents till you find what you want, then go into that level and keep checking each lesson till you find what you’re looking for… really??? That’s so lame guys, please fix it.