Wordchain is a series of comprehensive apps focused on building capable, confident Kiwi readers and writers! Created in Aotearoa New Zealand, it features New Zealand accents. 

The apps are designed to independently teach the skills that underlie successful reading and spelling: phonological awareness, phonics, and ‘chunking’.

Wordchain has been used in many New Zealand schools with outstanding results, and featured in the Government’s 2020 Classroom Kete.

But perhaps most importantly, it’s a huge success with kids: we have many stories of them clamouring to be allowed to play “the penguin game”!

Find out more in “Why Wordchain?“

After two years of testing in NZ schools, Wordchain officially launched in 2017 as four apps for iOS and Android devices.

In 2020, Wordchain 1 & 2 were released with Australian accents for the Australian market.

The WordChain apps are the software part of Betsy Sewell’s Agility With Sound, a comprehensive programme for building confident capable readers. Agility With Sound includes an extensive range of readers that link directly into the various levels of WordChain so that kids can put their learning about words directly into use in reading tailored to those specific words.

Betsy’s programme is a product of her many experiences: as a teacher, as a research anthropologist and as a mother of dyslexic children. From those careers she developed a disciplined, systematic, scientific way of breaking down barriers to reading competency.

She has worked with hundreds of children who struggled with reading: teaching them, listening to their stories and to the anguish of their parents and care-givers, the bewilderment and powerlessness of their teachers. Her passion has seen her create Agility With Sound as a fundamental tool in helping so many children achieve reading success!