📖 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 Words	Hear a word, build it from letter tiles, then read it in a sentence	▶ play 👈 this one
🥅 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 Big Numbers	Tens and ones, adding and taking away all the way to 100	▶ play
🍎 Jack's Apples	Trace 1–20, then fill the missing numbers into the apple grid	▶ play
👀 Jack's Sight Words	The twenty most common English words on big cards — tap one and hear it read out	▶ play
♟️ Jackies Schach	Full FIDE rules with a coach that marks the safe squares (German)	▶ play

All eight on one start page: jackbenn.ing

🛠 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 once the page has loaded. 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 — the browser's Web Speech API, preferring a British English voice. It always waits for a tap first, because Chrome and iOS block audio without user activation.
• 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.