We are celebrating the release of Reading Raven 1.3.2 for iPhone by giving away five codes to our app, which is currently priced at $2.99 for all five lessons in the Apple App Store. New in this release are usability enhancements, including a fun new design for the Reading Raven tree house.

The 3-Step Process to Winning

To enter to win, LIKE our Facebook Page and COMMENT on what you like most about Reading Raven if you and your children have already used it.

Or, if you have not used Reading Raven before, tell us what aspects of Reading Raven you think your children will enjoy the most!

Share on Facebook for a Second Chance to Win!

SHARE the post with your Facebook friends and you’ll be entered twice.

Message Us

Send us a message via Facebook so we can get in touch with you if you win.

Announcement of Winners

We will randomly select five Reading Raven winners from people who have Liked, Commented, Shared and Messaged us.

This giveaway ends Tuesday, September 25th at midnight PDT. Winners will be announced the following day.

The team at Early Ascent has been busy working on the iPhone version of Reading Raven, and we are delighted to announce the arrival of Reading Raven 1.2 in the Apple App Store. In order to allow more parents and educators to become familiar with our fun learning adventures, Lesson 1 of Reading Raven is now completely free for iPhone and iPod Touch users!

The free download gives you unlimited access to all lesson components, reading and learning activities in Lesson 1. In addition, you can personalize the app settings based on the age and learning level of the children using the app. If you like what you see, you can now download each additional lesson for 99 cents, or buy the entire bundle for 3.99 dollars.

Due to the smaller form factor of the iPhone, activities such as word tracing is done one letter at a time. We have also included a “pause” button in the app so users can receive or make calls, and subsequently get right back to the exact place they were before.

We hope you are as excited about the iPhone version as we are, and we invite you to continue to Email Us feedback and suggestions. In the meantime, our team is hard at work on adding new Reading Raven capabilities, such as multi-user support, and the next set of lessons. You can learn more about our upcoming plans and promotions by signing up for email notifications and by joining us on Facebook and Twitter.

Summer is quickly approaching and some of us are starting to think about what camps to send our kids to. Should we do a combination of arts, nature, literacy and science camps, or something completely different? We thought we would ask you for your suggestions and give you a chance to win a FREE code to Reading Raven for iPad.

How to Win!

To enter to win, visit our Facebook Page and tell us about a favorite summer camp you have sent your child to in the past or planning to have him or her attend this summer.

Or, if your child is too young for camps let us know about a memorable summer camp you attended!

Share on Facebook for a Second Chance to Win!

Tell us about a camp and share the post with your Facebook friends and you’ll be entered twice.

We will randomly select 4 Reading Raven winners from amongst our Facebook commenters and sharers.

This giveaway ends Sunday, May 27th at midnight PDT.

We are pleased to announce that Reading Raven for iPad 1.1, our first update since the original release in February, is now available in the App Store.

It has been thrilling to hear from parents, teachers, homeschoolers and kids about all the things they like most about Reading Raven. We have also appreciated all the feedback and ideas about new features you would like to see incorporated in the next version. So, to show you we are listening, we have included a number of those ideas and other usability enhancements in Reading Raven for iPad 1.1.

To expand user choice, we have added font and case selection options. Users now have four popular reading fonts to choose from: Ball-and-stick, Zaner Bose, HWT and D’Nelian. Because different educators emphasize different fonts and writing styles depending on the age and learning level of children, parents and teachers can now select what best suits the needs of individual learners. We have also added case selection, including lower case, upper case and regular sentence case.

Our redesigned Sticker Book has morphed into a treehouse where kids can collect and move around the stickers they earn when they complete individual learning activities and lessons throughout the learn-to-read adventures.

We are already working on our next set of upgrades, including multi-user capabilites, so parents and teachers can set up profiles for multiple kids. In the meantime, please keep that user-feedback coming! You can email us at support@readingraven.com, join us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

Traveling and living abroad and immersing yourself in the local culture, language, and cuisine is a great adventure. Add kids, and it’s an opportunity of a lifetime! While other kids may learn about Paris from Madeline, or India from The Jungle Book, the child abroad gets to see, hear, taste, smell, and thoroughly experience other places and cultures. In some families, traveling becomes the rule, not the exception. Others choose to lay down roots in faraway lands. When that happens most people raising a family start to think about how they can mix their own native language and culture (which now might be coming from Dr. Seuss and other books!) with the vibrant, living culture around them.

Of course, some people live in established expat communities with easy and affordable access to English-language schools. Yet, for people who have moved abroad for a long-term work commitment or because they have married someone from another country, gaining access to engaging English-language resources and teaching materials has traditionally been more challenging.

While your children probably begin formal schooling in the language of your new country and easily pick up spoken English from you at home, reading and writing are another story. We know that all parents are teachers of sorts, but some (for whom phonics lessons are ancient history) may not feel comfortable doing more formal lessons. For example, as a Dane raising a child in America, I often bought children’s books, workbooks and games whenever I went to Denmark, to help my child build Danish language reading and comprehension skills. Now in the age of the Internet, we can much more easily get that piece of home delivered directly to our portable devices. With the popularity of smart phones and tablets and the availability of all manner of educational apps, including learn-to-read, spelling, and writing apps, it certainly becomes a whole lot easier to complement workbooks and online learning materials with a more interactive approach no matter where you live. Now it’s not so daunting to think about being an English teacher!

The great advantage of apps as supplemental tools for teaching your children to read, at home or abroad, is that well-designed apps fully engage children with multi-sensory learning activities. This ability to grab and hold kids’ attention is especially helpful while traveling, providing educational entertainment during long plane or train trips. And, of course, the ability to carry games, books, lessons, media, and music, all in one light-weight electronic device, is invaluable when trying to pack your life into a suitcase or two. No need to bring all those workbooks!

Where do you find good apps for children? Sites abound, with some entirely dedicated to evaluating educational apps for young children. We think the following are a good place to start: Children’s Technology Review, Common Sense Media and Kindertown.

So, when in Rome, do as the Romans, and rest assured that you can still find plenty of educational resources that help your children learn to read English, while being immersed in other languages and cultures.

(Note: This is a cross post from Kindertown’s blog. Kindertown, a wonderful curator of high quality educational apps, was kind of enough to invite us to do the first guest post on their blog.)

With our initial 1.0 release, parental feedback has been extremely positive and since its release less than a month ago, Reading Raven has consistently ranked among the top 200 paid apps in the Education category of Apple’s App Store.

The idea that sparked the creation of Reading Raven came when Early Ascent founder, Scott White, was researching how he could best teach his five year old son to read. The apps he found felt one-dimensional and narrow, while the workbooks seemed effective, but dull. Thus Reading Raven was developed to combine the high educational value of workbooks with the unique user experience of touch screen mobile devices in an educational game format that is fun and engaging.

Reading Raven is phonics-based, and unlike other learn-to-read apps, even phonics apps, it takes children all the way from learning foundational pre-reading and reading skills to reading sentences and very short stories. The lessons include nearly a dozen different types of games and activities, including printing practice, word building, rhyming games, and reading aloud activities. Lessons are staged in a natural progression so that everything a child learns builds on what they have learned before and each success leads to another.

Working closely with experienced educators, the Reading Raven curriculum was adapted from a highly successful early-learning tutoring program. As part of this adaptation, the Reading Raven team has made full use of the iPad’s ability to engage children’s senses with the interactive touch screen and superior-quality voice, music, and visual content. Many of the activities dynamically adapt in speed or touch tolerance, based on individual children’s responses, so that the level of motor control is set at just the right level. Young children can even record their own voice while learning to read words and sentences and hear feedback that helps them improve their pronunciation.

Another key part of this adaptation was the involvement of our team of artists and designers who transformed traditional workbook activities into lively learning adventures that captivate children’s attention. The Reading Raven character was created as an “adventure guide” to accompany children through these various reading lessons, each set in a unique, playful setting with a new cast of delightful characters. During these learn-to-read adventures, children encounter everything from fly-eating frogs and ball-balancing seals to Yeti, the abominable snowman. By transporting kids into a world that stimulates their imagination and challenges them at just the right level, children avoid any anxious feelings of being pressured or tested. Instead they feel empowered to learn in a way that feels natural, fun, and rewarding.

Creating a reading tool that young children find enjoyable is a key goal of ours, but even more important is to give every child a solid foundation of skills to become able and confident readers. Children learn in different ways, and each child has unique strengths and struggles. Reading Raven acknowledges children’s individuality by allowing parents and teachers to customize their child’s learning experience by selecting the activities that meet each child’s needs. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, Reading Raven can become a personalized tutor who can reach kids who are just learning the alphabet to kids who are ready to read sentences. Our hope is that no matter where kids begin their journey with Reading Raven, they will be able to grow their reading skills at a pace that feels comfortable for them.

Check out this video to see Reading Raven in action:

Happy Reading Adventures!
– The Early Ascent Team

(Read Kindertown’s review of of the Reading Raven educational app)

We are delighted to announce the release of Reading Raven for iPad in the Apple App Store. Our beta testers and advisors have been using the app for some time and their initial reaction to Reading Raven’s learn-to-read adventures has been extremely positive. With this week’s release anyone with an iPad can download our app and start using it. We are excited to find out how children, parents and teachers respond to Reading Raven and we encourage your feedback and suggestions on how we can improve the user experience as we help children learn to read.

Reading is such a foundational skill that many adults don’t even remember how they learned it; they simply take it for granted. But as any reading specialist will tell you, learning to read doesn’t happen overnight and learning to read is more like a marathon than a sprint. Children learn in different ways and each child has his or her own unique strengths and struggles. Thus designing a product that is universally useful for all children is both an enormous challenge and an opportunity. We will be collecting all the feedback we receive and use it to evolve our product and work to continually improve it.

Reading Raven takes children from basic pre-reading skills to reading simple sentences aloud through lessons that are richly multi-dimensional, fun and engaging. Reading Raven allows parents to customize their children’s learning experience to match their abilities at just the right level. Some children may want to practice letter recognition and letter tracing while others may want to focus on reading aloud and rhyming activities, or perhaps go through all the activities.

We have designed our lessons as reading adventures where each lesson has its own unique cast of characters and themed games. With Reading Raven, children learn naturally while being challenged and stimulated in a setting that is extremely playful and fun. There’s nothing more exciting for a parent or teacher than seeing their child’s face light up when she hears her own voice played back to her after reading a sentence or receiving recognition for correctly tracing one of her first letters.

Welcome to Reading Raven. Happy reading adventures!