READING MAGIC 1 Short Vowel Words Deluxe can help your child’s future reading success. READING MAGIC focuses on CVC (consonant - vowel - consonant) words, such as cat, box and pig. In the first part of the app, the words are categorized by middle vowel sounds. In the second part of the app, the words are sorted by categories rather than by vowel sound. READING MAGIC has over 200 words to interest your child, and help them learn how to blend, segment, and read CVC words. READING MAGIC features both male and female voices for every word and picture. READING MAGIC gives your child key reading skills practice. READING MAGIC stays committed to time tested phonics principles, to techniques proven to be successful. READING MAGIC will give your child solid and direct experience with letters and sounds to help build their phonemic awareness skills. It will help improve your child’s phonological processing ability guiding them towards becoming a good reader. READING MAGIC has three skill levels for reading development: -Blending Blending is taking individual letter sounds and combining or blending them into a meaningful word.  It could be called “auditory reading” or reading just by sounds with NO letters.   This can be a difficult task when starting off and will take practice and patience to get the hang of it. The process of turning /b/  +  /e/  +  /l/  +  /t/ into “belt” is a neurological challenge for emerging readers. It may take some practice to develop this skill, but the time spent is well worth it.  Blending is the best way of preparing a child for the much more difficult and essential skill of segmenting.  -Segmenting Segmenting is one of the most important skills children need for successful spelling, reading and writing. Segmenting can be difficult. One way to look at segmenting is that it is spelling words using the sounds of the letters rather than the names of the letters.   Please understand the importance of segmenting and the segmenting feature of this app.  If you don’t understand it or it doesn’t make sense to you, please trust the process and realize that,  “The ability to segment is a powerful predictor of future reading success.” (Yopp, 1996)   Segmenting is a skill and exercise that is not practiced and unknown by most parents and even many educators and yet,    “The best predictor of reading difficulty in kindergarten or first grade is the inability to segment words and syllables into constituent sound units (phonemic awareness).” (Lyon, 1995).   Segmenting is closely associated with spelling. Segmenting is taking a word and breaking it up into its sound parts. In segmenting, the sounds and not the names of the letters are used.  -Reading The READING mode should ideally be used only after practicing and becoming skilled at Skill 1 Blending and Skill 2 Segmenting. The reading mode is designed to encourage reading and discourage picture guessing by keeping the picture hidden until after the user taps on the empty frame. That way the user can read the word without being distracted by the picture and its clues as to what the word is. Please note that there may be many words on this app that are not in the everyday vocabulary of the young learners using this app. Use this as an opportunity to build vocabulary.  In order to give lots of practice to build strong skills with blending, segmenting and reading many words were needed including those that are outside the realm of everyday common words. There is no need to know what the picture is beforehand for blending and reading. For segmenting, the picture can always be touched to identify itself. A team of educators using accelerated learning techniques and Montessori principles developed this fun app, which your child will enjoy using as they learn. It has been tested and successfully used with preschoolers. Please give us your feedback and suggestions.