Our kindergartener came home with a list of 100 words that she needed to be able to recognize on sight. The teacher called these “Fry’s First 100 Words.” We had no idea what she was talking about – but as diligent parents we set to work. Our girl could read them (sounding out the sounds) just fine. However, getting her to use instant recall was taking more effort. We thought about making flash cards but we weren’t excited about making 100 of them. Then we found out there was a second 100 words to follow and we knew that carting around 200 flash cards was a no-go. Then we found out this continued to the first 1,000 words. Desperation set in.
In lieu of flash cards, we started the app search. Lo and behold, these first 1,000 words had been ported to an app that did exactly what we wanted with an extra gaming element for good measure. Hello, Fry Words from Alligator Apps. In the basic mode, the words are divided up into sets of ten. A child can easily navigate the stacks, ordered by simplicity. They then browse the words as flash cards and can hit a voice prompt to hear the word read aloud. There is an optional timer element that will auto-scroll the cards at selected intervals for speed testing or (subliminal?) reinforcement. There’s also an additional set of Fry’s 100 Picture Nouns. Just for fun.
The game element is quite fun for our five year old. A word is said aloud and the child selects the word from a list of possibilities. This lets them stretch their phonics skills, especially on the advanced sets that we haven’t memorized yet. You can star “Favorite” words (in our case, words that need more work) and shuffle the sets to keep things interesting.
Fry Words is a simple app that does one thing and does it well. The best part? It’s FREE.
Download it: Fry Words – iTunes App Store
Lee Heidel is a web developer living in Savannah, GA. He loves raising a little girl, brewing his own beer and playing the ukulele. Listed in order of importance. You can find him on Twitter @nonaesthetic.
