Mom’s Choice Awards is excited to announce another post in our interview series where we chat with the inventors, designers, publishers, and others behind some of our favorite family-friendly products.

Hello, Mom’s Choice readers! Thank you all so much for joining us again as we speak to honorees about their amazing, award-winning products. For this interview, we were able to speak with Erika Bird, developer of the MCA award-winning educational product, The Reading Game 2nd Edition! The Reading Game includes six beautifully illustrated story books, six decks of matching playing cards, & a Teacher and Parent’s Guide. The fun matching card word games with picture flashcards and content-rich storybooks can help ANY child learn to read. The staged learning format ensures success – even for struggling readers. The Reading Game 2nd Edition is the perfect way to kickstart your child’s journey to becoming an avid reader! Keep reading to find out more about Erika and her award-winning product, The Reading Game 2nd Edition!

MCA: Hi Erika, it is such a pleasure to have you join us today, and a huge congratulations on your Mom’s Choice Award! Reading is so important in the early years of a child’s life, so educational products such as The Reading Game 2nd Edition are crucial tools for parents with young ones that are ready to start reading on their own. Can we first start the interview off by telling us a bit about yourself?

The MCA award-winning educational product, The Reading Game 2nd Edition.

Erika: I love to read! So this is my PERFECT job! In addition to working in our small family educational publishing business with my Dad, I also serve on the Board of the San Diego Council on Literacy, as a substitute teacher in California, and as a co-author on the Wordly Wise 3000 vocabulary series.

MCA: It’s amazing you were able to keep your passion and career so well entwined! Tell us more about your small family educational publishing business, including how it was created.

Erika: My Dad, Kenneth Hodkinson, wrote the best-selling vocabulary curriculum series, Wordly Wise, way back in 1967! It is used in over 10,000 school systems here in the USA as well as by tens of thousands of homeschooling families. My Dad is a creator, an inventor, and a lover of words, and always strives to make learning fun, so when he developed a fast action memory card matching word game to help my daughter learn some of the harder sight words for Kindergarten and 1st grade, he then wrote books that used just those words to help build her confidence in reading. She picked it up so quickly, we knew we had a winner on our hands! We then field-tested the game with teachers and homeschoolers, and with some minor tweaking, we came out with the first edition in 2011, and our small publishing business was born! Now in its second edition and five print runs later, The Reading Game has won numerous industry awards and helped countless children to have fun while learning to read!

MCA: WOW, what a legacy! Congratulations on all the success you and your family have found. You must be so proud of your dad! Can you tell us about the research that went behind The Reading Game‘s unique features?

Erika pictured here with her dad, Kenneth Hodkinson!

Erika: The Reading Game teaches 180 sight words for Kindergarten and First Grade Levels. 63% of those are Dolch sight words, which are often called “whole word learning” words. As a rule, they cannot be sounded out, and they don’t have a correlating picture to help a child memorize the word (think house, mouse, or chair, as opposed to, might, because, this). We believe we are the only Dolch Sight Word Game on the market! We developed the game to be played in small stages, scaffolding the learning step by step. This staged learning format first introduces individual words through gameplay in a fast-action memory card-matching game. Each game teaches only a manageable five new words at a time using color-coded animal-playing cards. After every ten words learned through game play, the child is shown a captioned picture flashcard incorporating the ten words just learned in short descriptive sentences, which helps the child transition from recognizing stand-alone words to reading short phrases. The final stage of the game is a full-length independent reader storybook told using ONLY the 30 words learned through gameplay, which the child can read without hesitation or frustration, building confidence and enjoyment in reading. Each of the storybooks is content-rich, engaging, and 32 pages long. There are six complete sets in the series. Before publication, we conducted field test studies with kindergarten classes, reading intervention specialists, homeschooling parents, and instructional coaches from the East Coast to the West Coast.

MCA: Why is it so important to start a child’s reading journey in a positive and fun way?

Erika: We believe the key to academic success is strong foundational literacy. So anything to make a child’s first experience with reading a positive one is a win in our eyes. That is how the game came about; we wanted to make sure that when a child reads his or her first book, it will be a fun and rewarding experience, not one where the child gets frustrated and perplexed by unknown words. Having a confident and fun start is what The Reading Game is all about!

MCA: Tell us about some of the animal stories readers can expect to find in The Reading Game!

Erika: Oh we have so much fun with Skunks, Snakes, Bears, Penguins, Unicorns, and Zebras!

MCA: What are some of the other awards The Reading Game has won?

Some of the other awards The Reading Game has won!

Erika: We are very proud of all the awards The Reading Game has won, especially the Mom’s Choice Awards! The Reading Game has also won the Dr. Toy Award, Academics Choice Award, Tillywig Brain Child of the Year Award, the National Parenting Center Seal of Approval, 2021 Blue Ribbon Award from The Old Schoolhouse, The Teacher’s Choice Award from Ed Dealer, and many other industry awards, along with being a top educational gift pick from Amazon and Homeschool.com

MCA: As you should be, what an honor! With all the success you have seen so far, what is next for The Reading Game?

Erika: The Magic Stories! Also a six-set package, The Magic Stories is a fun language arts resource for elementary-age children. It is a delightful set of six storybooks, including The Magic Boots and The Magic Hot Dog just to name two, along with reading and writing comprehension worksheets (including a comprehension Maze!) and word prompt cards. The Magic Stories is available as a digital download and optimized for tablets or you can print them out. Ages 6+ www.themagicstories.com.

MCA: Sounds absolutely magical, we can’t wait to check them out! 

You can learn more about Erika Bird and her award-winning product, The Reading Game 2nd Edition, by visiting her MCA Shop pages.