Sound It First - A Phonics Game for Young Kids

Most letter apps show a kid an A and a picture of an apple at the same time, so the child learns to match the picture, not read the letter. I wanted the opposite: make reading the bare letter the thing that wins.

So I built Sound It First with my friend Gaz, who has young boys who use it to help learn their letters outside of school. It's a phonics racing game for little kids, and it's free, no sign-up, and works fully offline. It started as a web app and it is now on the App Store too.

The core loop#

The whole game is one idea. A clean, high-contrast letter appears in the middle of the screen. Then, over a few seconds, a picture of something whose name starts with that letter's sound fades and grows in (a becomes a 🍎 apple, s becomes a hissing 🐍 snake), while the letter eases back to a small badge in the corner so the letter, object and sound all stay on screen together.

Players race to call out the sound and the word ("/a/ ... apple!"). The earlier you call it, the more points you score. That's the trick: the picture is the reward, not the hint. To win you have to read the naked letter before the picture forms, so kids come to actually want to decode the glyph rather than wait for the image. A grown-up confirms each call, then the picture finishes, confetti flies, and the app speaks the sound and the word back: "/a/ ... apple." Next letter.

What's in it already#

It started as the alphabet, but it has grown into a fair bit more. There are three ways to play any pack:

• Race - up to 5 players on one device, each with a coloured buzzer, scored by who calls it earliest.
• Find it - a gentle solo mode: hear the sound, then tap the matching picture.
• Practice - no timer, no winners, just calm repetition at your own pace.

And the content reaches well past A-B-C:

• A phonics path that follows the way reading is actually taught, by sound rather than alphabetically: single letter sounds, blending letters into short words (c-a-t), two-letter sounds (sh, ch), word families, magic-e, sight words, and reading simple sentences.
• Story time decodable mini-books to read together once the early sounds click.
• Vocabulary packs: animals, food, family, body, clothes, transport, weather, feelings, nature, colours, shapes, opposites and action words.
• Early numbers and maths: counting, plus simple adding, taking away and times tables.

There's a bit of care under the hood too. Per-child profiles mean siblings keep their own progress and stickers, a daily streak keeps them coming back, and the app quietly resurfaces the sounds a child keeps calling late so they get extra practice on exactly the ones they find hard. There's even a calm classroom mode for teachers, with the phonics sequence laid out in order and a view of which sounds a whole class is finding tricky.

One feature I'm especially fond of: you can record your own voice, and the app will then say the sounds and words in it. For a small child, being read to by their mum or dad's voice turns an app into something closer to a keepsake. By default it uses an Australian voice.

A couple of decisions that matter#

• Sound-first, not name-first. What you race to call is the phoneme ("/a/"), not the letter name ("ay"), and the on-screen caption always shows the pure sound. The spoken line is still a full sentence ("A is for Apple") because text-to-speech cannot say an isolated "/a/" without turning it into "ay" or "uh". Genuinely clean phoneme audio needs a human in a booth, and that is the next thing on the list.
• Speed is the difficulty dial. Slow (15 seconds) for absolute beginners, down to Zoom (3 seconds) once a kid is confident, with an optional auto speed-up that ramps it after a run of fast correct calls.
• Toddler-safe. Big targets, no menus to wander into mid-game (exit is press-and-hold), no ads, no accounts, and it runs fully offline once loaded.

Now on the App Store#

Sound It First is on the App Store for iPhone and iPad. It's the same game, wrapped as a native app so it sits on the home screen next to everything else a kid already taps, keeps the screen awake mid-round, and adds haptics on the buzzers. Nothing was taken away for the web: the browser version is still free, still offline-capable, and still needs no sign-up.

It's free with no ads and no accounts, which is the whole point for a kids' app. If it finds an audience I'll keep building it into a full reading app.

Try it: morphabet.joshsalway.com in a browser, or download it on the App Store. A tablet in landscape is the intended screen.