Everything you need to use Wake Eng.Read.Write.Ap — how to start, what the ten games teach, how to read a report, and how to keep your child's results safe.
For app version 1.0
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A two-year-old who can recite the alphabet has learnt a song. It is a lovely song, and it is not reading. Reading begins somewhere else entirely: with hearing that “mango” starts with mmm, and that the mark m is what that sound looks like written down.
That is why this app says mmm and never “em”. A child taught the letters' names will read c-a-t as “see-ay-tee” and hear nothing that helps. A child taught the sounds will read c-a-t as kuh-ah-tuh — and then, one day, hear “cat” come out of their own mouth. That moment is the whole of it, and everything in this app is arranged to bring it closer.
Most children of this age are not reading, and are not supposed to be. What they can do is hear sounds, recognise a few familiar words by their shape, enjoy rhyme, and start to make marks with a finger. All four are in here. If your child does no more than enjoy the pictures and repeat the words for a few months, the app is working exactly as intended.
Wake NumAp, Wake Easy.Sums.Ap and Wake Quick.Sums.Ap run in that order and are about numbers. Wake Color.Num.Ap is about colours and fractions. This one is about English, and it depends on none of them — a child can start here at two and be doing all of them at once.
The app talks; it never listens. There is no microphone in it and no recording of any kind, so nothing your child says leaves the room, because nothing here hears it in the first place. The spelling game asks a child to tap the letters they hear rather than say them — the same learning, with nothing about a small child sent anywhere.
▲ Back to the contentsWake Eng.Read.Write.Ap runs in a web browser, but it is meant to live on the home screen like any other app. On Android, open it in Chrome, tap the three dots and choose Add to Home screen. On iPhone, open it in Safari, tap the share button and choose Add to Home Screen.
Once it is there it opens full screen, without browser buttons, and works with no internet at all.
Opening the file inside WhatsApp, Gmail or a file manager shows a preview, and previews do not run apps: the buttons will not respond. Save the file first and open it with Chrome or Safari — or, better, ask for the web link rather than the file.
Tap Add a pupil, then give a first name, an age and a picture. No email is asked for, and the 7-day free trial starts at once. Two days before it ends the app shows you the plans; when it ends it offers 3 more free days, once. A grown-up's email is asked for only if you choose to pay, because the receipt goes there. Nothing leaves the device unless you choose to send it.
This is the one app in the set that is not meant to be handed over. At two and three, the value is in the two of you saying the words together — the app is the thing you are both looking at, not the thing doing the teaching. Five minutes side by side beats twenty minutes alone, every time.
Nothing is locked. Every pupil can reach every game immediately, in any order. The tiles are numbered 1 to 10 in the order we suggest learning them, and a beginner's first tile carries a Start here tag until they have played something — but a child who loves the writing game can live on game 10 for a month and come to no harm.
The app knows about 285 everyday words, the numbers zero to twenty among them. A two-year-old does not meet all of them at once: age decides how many the games draw on to begin with — the shortest words for a two-year-old — and the set widens by itself once those are secure. A grown-up can set it by hand in Settings → How many words, or switch the widening off there.
Every question except Trace with me (which has its own writing space) has a yellow ✏️ pencil in its top corner. Tapping it opens a sheet of handwriting paper, with a firm line to sit the letters on and a dashed line through the middle, and the question across the top. Your child can copy the letter or the word with a finger or a stylus. Pencil, rubber, undo and clear are along the top; ✔ Back returns to the question. Nothing written is kept or sent anywhere: the paper is wiped clean for the next question. It is there to encourage writing.
▲ Back to the contentsEvery game is marked instantly, and every wrong answer is answered with the right one before the app moves on. There is no buzzer and no red cross anywhere in this app.
| # | Game | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Letter sounds | A sound is spoken on its own — mmm — and the child taps the letter that makes it. This is the door into reading; everything after it depends on this one. |
| 2 | How does it start? | A picture, its word spoken aloud, and four letters. Hearing a sound inside a word is harder than hearing it alone. |
| 3 | Say it with me | The word, its picture and its sentence. Tap to hear the whole word, or to hear it sound by sound. Then say it together and tap I said it. This one is never marked wrong. |
| 4 | Find the word | A picture, and four written words that look alike. The child picks the one that says it. |
| 5 | Read it | The real thing: a written word, nothing spoken, and four pictures. This is meant to be the hardest of the ten, and a lower score here than anywhere else is completely normal. |
| 6 | Rhyme time | Cat and hat. Children who hear rhyme early find reading easier a year later — it is one of the strongest signs there is, and it is the ear doing the work, not the eye. |
| 7 | What does it mean? | A whole sentence read aloud, and three pictures. Half of these are the place words — in, on, under, behind — which are drawn rather than photographed, because “under” is not a thing you can take a picture of. |
| 8 | Spell it | The app says a word; the child taps its letters in order from a tray. Short sound-it-out words first: cat, dog, sun. |
| 9 | Correct the wrong spelling | A word with its own letters muddled up — noion for onion, nien for nine — struck through, with a picture above it. The child taps those same letters back into the right order. Nothing is missing and no letter is wrong; only the order is. Half of it is the number words from zero to twenty, so it doubles as counting. |
| 10 | Trace with me | Writing. A dot walks slowly along the letter and the child follows it with a finger. |
Most words are built from their sounds, and the app takes them apart so a child can hear how: sheep is not s-h-e-e-p, it is sh — ee — p, three sounds. Notice that two letters often make one sound. That is normal English and the app shows it that way everywhere.
But some words break the rules altogether. One, friend, the, two, eight, you — none of them can be built from their letters, and a child told to try is being asked to do something impossible. When the app meets one of these it says so: it shows the word whole, marked learn this one by sight, and says it whole rather than in pieces that are not true. Teachers call these tricky words, and they are learnt by being seen and said often — look at it, say it, cover it, write it — not by sounding out.
About one word in four here is one of these. That is English, not your child.
The muddled word and the right word always have exactly the same letters and exactly the same number of them. There are no spare letters in the tray and none missing, so a child can never be beaten by a letter they were not given — the only thing being asked is the order.
The words get longer as your child earns it, not as they get older. Everyone starts on words of five letters or fewer. After about a dozen questions mostly right, words of up to seven letters come in — eleven, twelve, twenty. After about thirty mostly right, the long ones arrive: thirteen, seventeen, nineteen. Nine muddled letters on the first day would simply end the game, so the app does not do that.
The words setting in Settings can still hold this back — a child kept on first words stays on five letters however well they do — but it can never push it forward. That decision belongs to the child's own record.
A word is never muddled into another real word. Pot will never be shown as top, because a child who can read top would be told a word they read correctly was wrong.
The dot moves in the order a hand really makes the strokes — down before across, round before the stem. That order matters: a child who learns to draw a letter backwards has to unlearn it later, and no picture of a finished letter can teach it.
What is marked is only how near the finger stayed to the dot. Not neatness, not speed, not whether the line is smooth — a two-year-old's hand cannot do neat, and marking them down for it would teach only that writing is something they fail at.
How your child is told they got it right. Stay with the dot about four times out of five and the letter changes in front of them: the pale guide and their own wobbly line disappear, and the letter they were following is left standing there printed properly. Nothing is said in words — they simply watch the thing they made turn into real writing.
That is a real bar, so nothing is marked wrong on the way to it. A go that misses is not counted against them at all; the app just asks them to press Start and try once more. After three goes it shows the printed letter anyway, so they end up looking at the right shape rather than at their own miss, and puts that letter on the list to come back to another day. No child is ever held on one letter, and the best of the three goes is the one that counts.
The bar and the number after each go show how much of the time they stayed with the dot. The bar is the part a small child reads — it fills up, and it turns green when they have made it. The number is for you, and for an older child who wants to beat their last one.
The dot waits for them. Most letters are two or three separate strokes, and between them the hand has to lift and go somewhere else. At the start of every stroke the dot sits still and pulses until the finger is on it, and none of that waiting is counted. Nobody is marked down for the time it takes to get there.
A finger works, and the game is built and marked for a finger — that is what your child will have. A stylus is easier, because a fingertip covers the very dot it is chasing, so it can help an older child who is getting frustrated. You do not need one.
When the answer is b, the other choices might be d, p or h — the letters children genuinely mix up. An option nobody would ever pick teaches nothing and quietly makes the question easier than it looks. This is also what lets the report tell you which kind of mistake is being made.
In Settings there is a row of buttons: Naming words, Doing words, Describing words, Place words, Little words. Turn one off and the games stop drawing on it. Leave them all on unless you are working on one kind in particular — and if you turn them all off, the app quietly behaves as though they were all on rather than running out of questions.
The big button at the top of the home screen plays a round drawn from all ten games at once. It is the best daily habit: short, varied, and it stops any one skill going stale.
▲ Back to the contentsReports, Settings, Support and the class dashboard sit behind a multiplication
question — 8 × 6 and the like. It is not security; it is a speed
bump that a three-year-old will not get past by tapping. Once answered it stays
open for ten minutes.
Stars earned, rounds played, best score and the day streak sit at the top, then Mixed practice, then a tile for each of the ten games. Each tile carries its suggested-order number and a small bar showing how that game is going, so progress is visible without opening anything.
The dots along the top show the questions: yellow is the one being answered, green is right, pink is wrong. Seven of the ten games answer by tapping a tile. Spell it and Correct the wrong spelling use a pop-up tray of letters; Trace with me uses the whole screen.
Every answer is marked at once. A right answer is praised; a wrong one is answered with the correct one, shown in letters and, where it helps, broken into its sounds. A child is never left with only a mark against them.
The app uses the phone's own voice — there is nothing to download. In Settings you can choose which way of speaking you would like: Ghanaian, British, American, Nigerian or South African. Phones do not all carry the same voices, so if the one you pick is not on your phone the app quietly uses the nearest English voice it has rather than going silent.
You can also pick a particular voice from the list and press the button to hear it. This matters more here than in any other Wake app: a child is learning what words sound like, so a muddy voice is a real problem. If none of them are clear on an iPhone, more voices can be added under Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content → Voices.
Underneath the voice list is every sound the app can say, laid out to be tapped. Tap one and you hear exactly what a child hears when a word is sounded out. It is worth a minute of anyone's time when a phone is new: no two phones read these spellings quite alike, and if one comes out wrong on yours — a letter's name instead of its sound, say — tell us which one and we can respell that single sound without disturbing any of the others. It is also simply a good place to check a sound yourself before teaching it.
Four pictures: scores over time, seconds per question, a skill board with a bar for each of the ten games, and the letter board — every letter and every numeral, green where the pupil is secure, pink where it still needs practice, plain where it has not come up yet. The letter board is fed by every game that touches a letter, so it is not one game's opinion.
A list of what this child keeps getting wrong, most-missed first, with a Practise these button that builds a round from that list alone.
▲ Back to the contentsThe report is written from the pupil's own recorded answers. It covers what has been played, how accurately, how quickly, which letters and words have been met, and what to do next. You can print it, save it as a PDF, email it or send it on WhatsApp.
Most of the value is here. A score tells you how much is wrong; these tell you what kind of wrong, and each one needs a different response.
| What it says | What it means |
|---|---|
| Letters back to front | b for d, p for q. At two and three this is completely ordinary and is not a sign of anything: those letters are the same shape facing different ways. The fix is the hand, not the eye — trace them. |
| Letters that look alike | n and m, u and v. Practise them in pairs rather than one at a time; the difference is easier to feel than to see. |
| Right letters, wrong order | Good news dressed up as a mistake — the sounds have been heard. Say the word slowly, one finger per sound, before the letters are chosen. |
| The middle sound astray | Vowels are the hardest sounds to hear and always come last. Say the pairs aloud — cat, cot, cut — until the middle is heard as different. |
The report also names it when answers arrive very fast and mostly wrong. That is tapping rather than thinking, and it is worth catching early.
Accuracy matters more than speed at this age, and the trend matters more than any single round. A dip usually means a tired child, not a lost skill. Four or five rounds must exist before a trend means anything at all.
Remember that Say it with me is practice rather than a test: it is always counted as done, so it lifts the score without proving anything. If you want a true picture of reading, look at Read it on the skill board.
The app never opens your email by itself — on some phones that takes the app away mid-report. Instead it shows the words with a Copy button, and you paste them wherever you like. There is a link to open your email app if you prefer, but copy first and nothing can be lost.
▲ Back to the contentsA licence belongs to the household or the classroom, not to one child. A family paying for three pupils is never asked to pay again for the second, and a child added later inherits the licence already on the device.
You may be sent a code rather than paying inside the app. It looks like
WR-Y365-7QK2-4M9X. Enter it under 🔑 Activate, exactly as
given, including the dashes. Capital and small letters both work.
Every app has its own two letters: WN- for Wake NumAp,
WM- for Wake Easy.Sums.Ap, WQ- for Wake
Quick.Sums.Ap, WC- for Wake Color.Num.Ap, WP- for
Wake Quick.Prod.Ap, WB- for Wake Mark.Book.Ap and
WR- for this one. A code for one app will not open another, and
if you enter the wrong one the app tells you which app it does belong to
rather than calling it invalid.
You need internet for this one step. A code is checked with our server the first time it is used, which is what stops one code being passed around a whole town. After that the app works with no internet at all, for as long as the plan lasts.
A warning appears five days before. When it does end, nothing is deleted — the pupil's whole history stays exactly where it is and returns the moment the plan is renewed.
▲ Back to the contentsAlmost always the browser's data was cleared, or the app was opened in a different browser. Results live in the browser that made them. Restore from a backup — see the next chapter.
The old copy is saved on the phone for use without internet. Close every tab of the app, then reopen it.
Check the switch in Settings, then the phone's own volume and silent switch. Some phones also need one tap anywhere in the app before they will play anything. A very old or very cheap phone may have no voice installed at all — the games all still work, they simply stay quiet.
It should not. Open Settings and use How this phone says each sound: tap through them until you find the one that is wrong. Then try a different voice from the list above it — some phone voices read our spellings oddly, and another voice often reads the same spelling correctly. Tell us which phone, which voice and which sound, and we will fix the spelling for everybody.
Let them press Start and just watch it once without trying. Following it the second time is much easier, and nothing is marked until the second attempt anyway.
Press and drag inside the white box only. If the page still moves, close the app fully and reopen it from the home-screen icon rather than inside the browser.
At the youngest setting there are only so many words to draw on. Asking for twenty questions a round means some will repeat. That is practice, not a fault — or widen the words in Settings.
Use the Copy the words button and paste into your email by hand. It is the reliable route on every phone.
▲ Back to the contentsEvery result lives in this browser on this device, and nowhere else. Nothing is uploaded to us. That keeps a child's data private — and it means that clearing your browser, changing phone or reinstalling will lose a term's work unless you have saved a backup.
Settings → Save a backup writes a small file to the device. Email it to yourself and it is safe. Do this at the end of each term, and before changing phone. To bring it back: Settings → Restore from a backup.
If a pupil already exists on the device, the copy with more history wins. Restoring can never quietly lose work. A backup made in a different Wake app is turned away by name, so a reading history can never land in a counting chart.
With a class licence, the teacher's dashboard can take a backup file sent from a family's own phone, so home practice appears alongside the rest of the class.
Settings → Clear results wipes that child's scores, charts, stars and tricky list, and leaves everything else alone: the child stays, and so does your subscription. Use it when a chart has stopped being a fair picture — after a much younger brother or sister has had a go on someone else's name, for instance.
Settings → Erase this pupil removes that child and all their results from the device. It cannot be undone, so save a backup first if there is any doubt. If the subscription was bought on this child, it goes with them — so if you only want a fresh chart, use Clear results above instead.
Wake Eng.Read.Write.Ap 2–3 · user manual · for app version 1.0. One of six Wake learning apps, each bought on its own.
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