A year ago, I wrote a review of the Mentava app for teaching children to read. I thought it was promising, but decided not to pay for a subscription. At the price, I thought that it would lead to too much pressure on my then three year old daughter (via me, her miserly father). My experience a year later, however, has given me a deeper appreciation for what Mentava is doing, and I’m a happy customer.
So, what’s happened?
Well, my daughter’s now four, and she’s nearly through her second month with Mentava. I decided it was time for her to give it another try after we got through a few lessons of “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons.” All I can say about that book, is that while all of the other words may be true, “easy” is not. My daughter could not sit still through a lesson, and I had to bribe her to finish one. Neither of us wanted to do the lessons, so some days (most days) we just wouldn’t.
Of course, I took this simply to mean that learning to read was hard, and that this is what it looked like trying to teach a four year old how to sound out words. Later, with Mentava, I’d find that it’s not the case. It’s still not easy, but it’s so much easier.
The good thing about our time with the “100 Easy Lessons” book is that it showed that my daughter had improved at a skill that held her back the last time we tried Mentava: blending of words and understanding the left-to-right order of sounds. This is something that the Mentava team says just comes when it comes. They even shared with me a PDF which I could use to test if my daughter understood the difference between 🐟🐶 and 🐶🐟.
Playing the Learning Game#
Once we got into the app, my daughter was now pushing me every night to play “the learning game.” Very rarely did I need to initiate this. She loves the animals. She loves the confetti when she gets a star. She loves that the pig eats ice cream every 100 lessons. The app is very much designed for both teaching and retention. That’s a hard mix, and they got it right.
That isn’t to say that she didn’t struggle. We’ve even developed a call and response.
Me: “We never…” Her: “Give up!” Me: “And we always…” Her: “Try our best!”
Still, I saw her struggle, and I saw her figuring out her own methods for getting through the rut. Early on, for example, she started saying the sounds even when the app didn’t ask her to. She said out loud to herself, “I learn them better when I say them.”
How Mentava Works#
All told, there are around 2,500 activities across the different lessons. Each lesson covers a sound (e.g., a) or a sight word (e.g., the). In later lessons, multiple sounds or sight words can be covered in a single lesson. In the last two months, my daughter completed just over 600 activities. Because the activities vary by length and difficulty, there are days where we’ll do just a small handful, and days where we do much more.
The simplest activities are always at the beginning of a lesson. A lesson will start off with a simple “open the barn door and learn the sound” activity, followed often by tapping of running sheep, word blending, and culminating in short stories. My daughter’s least favorite activities by far are the ones where she leads a rooster to the roost by choosing the word that matches the one I said out loud. I get that—it is a bit of a slog—though it also helps her practice her “stick with it” muscle.
As for when we do Mentava, we try to do a couple activities every morning before she goes to school. Then we almost always do some right before bed. On the weekends, we’ll sprinkle them throughout the day. I definitely notice that she does better in the morning. She guesses at a word less, and doesn’t mix up b and d quite so much.
Reading Actually Isn’t the Biggest Benefit#
Beyond the immediate benefit of learning to read, there’s also the benefit that she’s learning. She is developing the feeling that learning is challenging, but that it’s fun when you can do something you couldn’t do before. Her two year old brother is learning this, too, as he’s right there beside her for most of her activities.
It has also reminded me that my wife and I need to model this for her. Often when you come across people online talking about teaching their children to read early, you look more into it, and you realize that both parents are professors or otherwise highly educated. Not me and my wife. Although she is much smarter than I am, both of us have just a four year degree. I bring out my workbooks that I’m using to learn a new language and work on them in the living room as the kids play, so my children see me do my own “learning games.”.
Having my own learning goals has the nice side effect of giving me extra empathy for my daughter. When I see her mixing up letters that she’s already seen before, which are oh-so-obvious to me, I think of my own struggle to learn a non-Latin alphabet.
While I’m showing off my own learning, my daughter also likes to show off hers. One of the nicest touches Mentava has put in place comes a handful of lessons in, once the kid has learned enough sounds to read a simple story. “Go find someone,” the app tells the kid. It’s story time. My daughter runs and grabs my wife and son, and they sit along with us as she reads.
Mentava Price#
When I reviewed Mentava a year ago, I mentioned that the price was what kept me away. I didn’t want to spend $500 a month, feel like I wasn’t getting my money’s worth as my daughter struggled, and push her too hard. The price is still a lot. It also doesn’t help that a subscription is per child and not per family. (Most families won’t have multiple children ready at the same time, anyway, so it’s annoying that I can’t see how my son would do without having his own subscription.)
If we keep up the same pace we’re on now, we’ll spend $4,000 teaching my daughter to read. We might go faster during the upcoming summer vacation, and maybe we’ll realize near the end that we can move on to books, but best case, this is $3,000. If we go again with our son, we’ll spend $6,000 to $8,000 between the two.
Conclusion#
At this price, we’re happy with Mentava. If we suspected that results would take longer, the choice becomes a lot more difficult. At a lower price, it’s an obvious subscribe, and one I wouldn’t be afraid to recommend to other parents.
We know we’re lucky to be able to afford this for our children. It helps that we are really just diverting child care money that’s no longer necessary since school is free in France starting at three years old. Not everyone in this situation.
So, should you use Mentava to teach your child to read? If your child can understand left to right order and is ready to blend sounds, and you have the money to put to it, I would recommend it. In the end, Mentava’s not just teaching reading, but teaching how to tackle tough things.