Every September brings the same fresh start: new classes, new reading groups, new children who need practice to become effortless rather than effortful. It’s the right moment to tell you that trugs itself has had a fresh start too, and this is the biggest one yet.
If you read the last update here, you’ll know trugs has spent this year finding new shapes for the same core idea: pop-out packs that need no scissors, printable PDFs you can have ready before the next lesson. That was trugs becoming easier to get hold of. This is trugs becoming something new to hold at all. The three core card games Get It, Match It and Take It are now live as individual apps for iPad and iPhone, and for the first time, the reading practice that used to live in a card box now lives in a pocket.
Same games, same colours, new format
If you know trugs, you’ll recognise these instantly. Each app keeps the identity of its physical card set – Get It in green, Match It in magenta, Take It in gold – and keeps the mechanic that makes trugs work: children play to win, not to complete an exercise. Nothing about the underlying method has changed. All three apps draw on the same decodable word decks and the same 15-stage progression that carries a reader from single sounds through to multi-syllable words, one small, achievable step at a time.
What the app format adds is what a card box can’t do on its own. Every word carries optional human audio, so a child can hear it sounded correctly when they need to check for themselves and switch it off when they don’t. There’s no opponent to find, either: play against Trug the robot for a game that’s always ready, win or lose. Alternatively, you can hand the device back and forth in two-player mode and read against a tutor, a parent, or a sibling, exactly as you would across a table.
Why now?
A new academic year means new starting points; new reception classes learning their first sounds, new Year 3s who still need Stage 6 four times a week, new tutoring clients who need something that travels between home and the car and the waiting room. An app doesn’t replace the card games; it goes where a card box sometimes can’t, which makes it a natural fit for exactly this point in the calendar, when everyone’s practice routines are being rebuilt from scratch anyway.
Free to download, until 30th September
All three apps, Get It, Match It and Take It, are currently free to download, and will stay that way until 30th September. So, use this as the moment to get all three onto a device rather than decide later which one you need: because they share the same stages and the same decks, most schools, tutors and families end up wanting more than one anyway.
- trugs Get It via the App Store
- trugs Match It via the App Store
- trugs Take It via the App Store
The same trugs, still becoming more of itself
None of this changes what trugs is for. It still supplies the practice; it still doesn’t replace the teaching. What’s changing is how many doors there are into that practice – card box, pop-out pack, printable PDF, and now an app in your pocket. A new era, a new academic year, and a lot more ways to say: read it again, and this time, make it a game.
Explore the full trugs range at readsuccessfully.com, or get in touch at trugs@readsuccessfully.com.