📖 Jack's Words

Hear a word, build it from letter tiles, then read it in a sentence

What this is

A reading game for a child who is just starting to read — roughly Reception to Year 1, ages 5 to 7. It works one word at a time through the same three steps a teacher would use: hear the word, build it from its letters, then meet it inside a real sentence. Twenty-eight words in three levels, from cat to teacher, each with its own sentence.

It is built for a specific six-year-old who is football-mad, so the reward for every finished word is a football. That is the whole economy: no lives, no timer, no way to lose.

🎮 How to play

1️⃣   Listen 🔊

Tap the blue button. A voice says the word.

2️⃣   Build it 🧩

Tap the letters in the right order. Tap a letter to hear its sound on its own.

3️⃣   Read it 🌈

The finished word lights up inside a sentence. Tap the sentence to hear all of it.

⚽   GOAL!

Every word wins a football. They line up along the top and stay there next time.

🔤 The word list

🐱 Level 1 — 3 letters	cat · dog · sun · mum · dad · pen · red · bag · hat · bus
📗 Level 2 — 4 letters	book · ball · blue · play · milk · frog · fish · star · jump · cake
🏫 Level 3 — 5 to 7	green · happy · water · lunch · apple · school · friend · teacher

🎯 What it practises

• 👂   Hearing the separate sounds inside a spoken word
• 🔡   Matching each sound to its letter
• 📖   Carrying a known word into connected text

⚙️ Notable details

• A phonics setting switches letter sounds (buh, sss) for letter names (bee, ess), matching how English primary schools teach it.
• The target word stays visible as a faint ghost behind the empty slots, so building it is supported rather than a memory test.
• Wrong tiles wobble and nothing is lost — there is no failure state anywhere in the game.

🎈 The other games

Game	What it is
🔟 Jack's Ten Frames	See numbers in fives, make ten, then add past ten on ten frames	▶ play
⏰ Jack's Clock	Read the clock and set the hands — o'clock, half past, quarter past, quarter to	▶ play
💯 Jack's Big Numbers	Tens and ones, adding and taking away all the way to 100	▶ play
👀 Jack's Sight Words	The twenty most common English words on big cards — tap one and hear it read out	▶ play
🍎 Jack's Apples	Trace 1–20, then fill the missing numbers into the apple grid	▶ play
🥅 Jack's Match	Tell real words from decodable nonsense words, then spell by ear	▶ play
✏️ Jack's Letters	Finger-trace all 26 lowercase letters in the correct stroke order	▶ play
🔢 Jack's Numbers	Count, add and subtract with footballs — to 10, then to 20	▶ play
📖 Jack's Words	Hear a word, build it from letter tiles, then read it in a sentence	▶ play 👈 this one
♟️ Jackies Schach	Full FIDE rules with a coach that marks the safe squares (German)	▶ play

All ten on one start page: jackbenn.ing — newest first, homework on top, chess always last.

🛠 Built like this

Every game in this organisation is one self-contained index.html — no build step, no framework, no package manager, no analytics, and no network calls beyond its own voice clips (chess also loads its rules engine, chess.js, from jsDelivr, and Sight Words its font from Google Fonts). That is a deliberate constraint: a game a child depends on should still work in five years, and a parent should be able to read the whole thing in one sitting.

• Speech — pre-rendered clips of the neural en-GB-SoniaNeural voice, played through Web Audio, with the Web Speech API as the fallback. The AudioContext is created inside the ▶ tap, because iOS refuses to start audio any other way.
• Progress — kept in localStorage on the device. Nothing is collected, sent or stored anywhere else.
• Made for an iPad mini in either orientation: finger-sized targets, no hover-only interactions, prefers-reduced-motion respected.

Run it locally:

python3 -m http.server 8000

The start page at jackbenn.ing is built from google814/Jack, which is the source of truth. The repos in this organisation are copies kept in step by tools/sync-game-repos.sh in that repo, so each game also has its own page and its own link.