Phonics Curriculum, Workbook, or App?

For most families with a 4- or 5-year-old, an app works well for daily practice alongside a few minutes of teaching. A curriculum or a book such as Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons gives you a sequence to follow. If your app publishes its teaching order, you can follow that too. If you homeschool and want a lesson to teach each day, start with a curriculum and use the app between lessons. Add a workbook for pencil practice.

Look for a program that teaches sounds directly and in a planned order, known as systematic phonics. The National Reading Panel found that this approach works across different programs and that kindergarten is not too early to start.

With a curriculum, you teach the lessons. An app gives your child practice on their own, and a workbook gives them practice on paper.

App, workbook, or curriculum: which one fits your family?

Start with who is already teaching your child phonics, then consider how much time you have each day.

Who is teaching phonics now	Start with	Add
Nobody yet: your child is not in school, or school has not started phonics	A phonics app with a set order, and reading together	A curriculum or 100 Easy Lessons if you want to teach a short lesson yourself
The school, and it teaches phonics	A phonics app for practice at home, on the skills the school’s program is teaching	A workbook or our free worksheets if your child likes pencil work
The school, but it does not teach much phonics	A parent-taught program, or the app with you teaching from its published order	The app for daily practice
You: you homeschool and teach the lessons	A parent-led curriculum	An app for independent practice, a workbook for pencil work

From preschool through 2nd grade, choose based on who teaches your child. Adjust the lesson length to their age.

If your child is already behind, start with how much help they need. A trained tutor is often the first step. Our guide to choosing a tutor, program, or app for a struggling reader covers that decision.

What an app, a workbook, and a curriculum each do

Think about what you will need to do each day: teach a lesson, help with a workbook page, or set up independent practice.

	Phonics app	Workbook	Parent-led curriculum
Who teaches	The app shows and practices; you teach alongside	Nobody: it is practice	You, from a script
Who keeps the order	The app, if it publishes one	The workbook’s page order	The curriculum
Who says the sounds	The app, out loud	You	You, with the script’s guidance
Your time each day	Little, once it is set up	Beside your child for each page, at first	Every lesson, taught by you
Pencil work	Pair with a workbook or worksheets	Yes	Some, in an activity book
Typical cost	Most subscriptions $35–$90 a year	Varies by book	Bought once, by the book or by the level

An app lets your child hear each sound and practice without you sitting beside them. A 2021 meta-analysis by Kim, Gilbert, Yu, and Gale of 36 studies found that apps helped early literacy overall. The effects were larger for preschoolers than for children in kindergarten to 3rd grade, and larger for specific skills like letter knowledge and phonics than for broader skills. Pair app practice with reading books together; our guide to what reading apps can help with explains why.

A workbook gives your child pencil practice: writing the letters for the sounds. It cannot say a sound or tell you how to teach one. Use it to practice something your child has already learned.

A parent-led curriculum gives you the teaching order, the words to say, and the materials. You can teach without planning a lesson, but you need to sit down with your child each time.

What should you look for in a phonics program?

Look for lessons that teach sounds directly, follow a planned order, and have your child use those sounds to read real words. Check a sample lesson for these six things.

1. You can see the teaching order before you buy. The National Reading Panel defines systematic phonics as teaching a planned sequence of sounds. Programs can follow different sequences, as our guide to teaching phonics in order explains. Hooked on Phonics, Reading.com, and Wonster Words each publish theirs.
2. It teaches each sound before your child uses it to read words. Look for lessons that connect sounds to letters and teach your child to blend them into words. The Institute of Education Sciences gives both recommendations its highest evidence rating, “strong evidence”. Guessing words from pictures or the first letter is not phonics; our guide to the science of reading explains why.
3. Your child builds words, as well as recognizing them. Look for letter tiles, sound boxes, or activities that let your child build words on screen. REL Midwest includes word-building activities among the features of instruction that follows the IES practice guide.
4. Your child hears the sounds said correctly. A curriculum guides your pronunciation with a script; an app plays recordings. Without that guidance, the sound at the start of “bat” easily becomes “buh”.
5. Lessons are short, frequent, and include review. A few minutes most days beats a long session once a week. Each lesson should bring back sounds from earlier ones.
6. It fits the time you actually have. Before you buy a curriculum, think about how many days a week you can sit down and teach.

The best phonics programs for home, by type

We make Wonster Words, one of the apps below, and we have not used the printed programs ourselves. We checked the printed programs’ features and prices against their publishers’ sites, stores, and sample pages in October 2026. We have used all three apps and label our observations “in our use”. We chose the three printed programs because they are by far the most searched in the US.

Program	Format	Best for	Who teaches	Price
Hooked on Phonics	Monthly boxes with the app, or the app alone	A family that wants a well-known path in print and on screen	You and the app	From $23.96 a month (boxes) · $14.99/mo or $129.99/yr (app alone)
All About Reading	Parent-led curriculum	Homeschool families who want open-and-go lessons	You, from a script	$159.95 for Level 1 materials
Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons	One book	The lowest-cost complete program	You, from a script	$29.99 list price
Wonster Words	App	Daily practice beside any of the above	The app, with you alongside	$10.99/mo or $59.99/yr, 7-day free trial
Reading.com	Parent-led app	A parent who wants to teach every lesson on a phone	You, with the app	$12.49/mo or $74.99/yr
Our free worksheets	Printable sheets	Free pencil practice	Practice only	Free

1. Hooked on Phonics: workbooks and an app in one subscription

• Best for: a family that wants a long-established program, ages 3–8, with printed workbooks and an app in one subscription.

• What it does well: each monthly box includes a 32-page phonics workbook and 2–3 storybooks. Your subscription also includes app access for up to 3 children, with spelling and math in the app as well. The published teaching sequence runs from a 12-step Pre-Reader level to a 30-step Learn to Read level. The publisher suggests 15–20 minutes a day. In our use, the app follows one set path, step by step. Children practice matching letters to sounds and sounds to letters.

• Where it falls short: you keep paying each month, while the other two printed programs are bought once. The app-only subscription does not include workbooks. In our use, the app placed a child at the start, and changing that placement later was difficult.

• Price: box plans from $23.96 a month, on Hooked on Phonics’ own pricing page, with a 30-day money-back guarantee. The app alone is $14.99 a month or $129.99 a year, with a 7-day free trial.

• Skip it if you would rather buy a program once than pay for it month by month.

2. All About Reading: best open-and-go curriculum for homeschool

• Best for: a homeschool family that wants a scripted lesson to teach each day, with hands-on pieces.

• What it does well: the publisher calls it “scripted, open-and-go”, with lessons of about 20 minutes a day. You can open the book and teach without planning first. There are 4 levels plus a pre-reading program for preschoolers and kindergartners. Each level has a placement test to help you start at your child’s level rather than choose by age. Level 1 has 53 lessons and 52 decodable stories. The publisher describes it as multisensory and as Orton-Gillingham based.

• Where it falls short: it asks you to teach every lesson, and some lessons take a week or more to finish. Each level is bought separately, and the letter tiles ($25.95) and a review box ($17.95) are extra.

• Price: $159.95 for the Level 1 materials from All About Learning Press, the publisher. You get a teacher’s manual, a student activity book with flashcards, and 3 readers. Returns are accepted for a year.

• Skip it if you cannot sit down to teach most days.

3. Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons: the lowest-cost complete program

• Best for: a parent who wants a whole program for the price of a book and can give it about 20 minutes a day.

• What it does well: Siegfried Engelmann, Phyllis Haddox, and Elaine Bruner put the whole program in one book. It is adapted from a school reading program using what the publisher calls “the Direct Instruction approach to phonics”. Every lesson tells you what to say. The publisher says 20 minutes a day takes a child to “about a second-grade level”. The current edition adds a practice guide for parents.

• Where it falls short: you teach every lesson, and the book has no practice your child can do alone.

• Price: $29.99 list price from Simon & Schuster, for the revised second edition.

• Skip it if your child cannot yet sit for 20 minutes of one-to-one teaching.

4. Wonster Words: daily practice beside any of the above

• Best for: a child from 2 to 8 who needs daily practice with sounds, alongside lessons from you or another program.

• What it does well: as a word comes together, your child hears each sound on its own, said short and clean with no vowel stuck on the end. Some activities show a word your child has not met before, built from sounds they know or are learning, and play a short animation once they have read it. Wonster Words publishes the order it teaches. You can customize it at setup and open a section by topic, such as Letter Sound, Blend Phonics, or Sight Words, to match what your child is learning. Daily and weekly emails show you what your child practiced.

• Where it fits best: as the practice your child does on their own between your lessons, or as a light, daily start for a 4-year-old before school begins teaching phonics.

• Best paired with: a parent-led curriculum or 100 Easy Lessons for the teaching, and a workbook or our free worksheets for pencil work.

• Price: $10.99 a month or $59.99 a year, with a 7-day free trial, on Apple, Google Play, and Amazon Kindle Fire tablets.

5. Reading.com: best for a parent who wants to teach every lesson on a phone

• Best for: a parent who wants a curriculum’s structure in an app and will sit with their child for every lesson.

• What it does well: you can see the teaching order for all 120 numbered lessons. Reading.com describes each as about 20 minutes, 3–5 times a week. In our use, the sequence was clear, and the decodable books kept the pictures hidden. Your child says the sounds aloud while you listen for most of the lesson.

• Where it falls short: in our use, a parent needed to be there to teach every lesson. It has no free trial.

• Price: $12.49 a month or $74.99 a year, in the app.

• Skip it if you want practice your child can do independently.

For more options, see our phonics app picks for a side-by-side comparison.

6. Our free phonics worksheets: free pencil practice

Best for: pencil practice at home, free, for a child who is being taught phonics by a program, an app, or a school.

The word lists on this site come with free printable worksheets, such as the CVC words worksheets and the sh words worksheets, with no email and no account. Use them to practice what your child learns from you or at school. You can find more no-cost options in our guide to free phonics apps and resources.

Using an app alongside a curriculum or workbook

You could teach a curriculum lesson on Monday and Thursday, then follow each lesson with a workbook page. On the other days, your child practices the week’s sounds in the app for 10 minutes. If your curriculum lists the week’s words, type those into the app.

Choosing a reading curriculum for homeschool

For a homeschooled kindergartner, a reading curriculum is mostly a phonics curriculum: at 5 and 6, the main job is learning how letters stand for sounds. Three questions narrow the choice.

Open-and-go, or build your own? An all-in-one curriculum gives you the order, the script, and the materials, so you can teach without planning and without worrying about gaps. Building your own from free materials costs less and suits a parent who already knows a phonics sequence. If you are unsure, start open-and-go; you can always loosen it.

More than one child at different levels? Look for a program with a placement test, such as All About Reading, so you can choose a level for each child. Consider the lesson length, too: both All About Reading and 100 Easy Lessons plan on about 20 minutes per lesson.

Secular or faith-based? Homeschool curricula come in both, so check the publisher’s description and a sample lesson before you buy.

Whichever you choose, give your child short practice they can do on their own between lessons. If your homeschooled child is already behind, see how to choose help for a struggling reader.

How do you know the program is working?

The test of any phonics program is whether your child can read a word they have not practiced. Every few weeks, write a short word on paper that uses sounds your child has learned but has not seen in that combination. Ask them to read it. Watch for the same progress in everyday reading: sounding out a new word in a book without being told to, remembering last month’s sounds, and needing less help with the same kind of book.

If you are seeing no progress after several weeks of regular lessons, ask your child’s teacher before you change programs. Our reading check-in walks through what to expect at each age.