The science, briefly.
School isn't a quiz factory. It's a handful of things we know from forty years of cognitive-science research, dressed up for kids.
Children learn to read by mapping speech sounds (phonemes) to letter patterns (graphemes), not by memorising words or guessing from pictures. School introduces letters by their sound first, teaches letter names only after sound mastery, and never encourages guessing.
A child does not advance to the next phoneme until they demonstrate mastery of the current one — both in recognition (hearing) and production (saying). Skills spiral back on a 1-3-7-14-30-60 day schedule.
We adjust difficulty after every answer — the sweet spot is ~80% correct. Boring? Step up. Tough? Step back. Default sessions are 15–20 minutes; we actively encourage offline practice with printable decodable readers.
Open-ended building (Spark) teaches the meta-skill of 'what should I try next?' — the missing piece of standard curricula. It's also where most kids' first taste of computational thinking lives.
Our audio pipeline combines an automatic speech recognizer optimized for child speech with a CTC-based goodness-of-pronunciation scorer. The AI's job is to assess, adapt, and encourage — never to entertain or read for the child when the child should be decoding.
Where your kid is, and where they're going.
- Stage 0 — Phonological awareness. Audio-only activities: rhyme, syllable clapping, phoneme isolation and blending.
- Stage 1 — Alphabetic principle. All 26 letter-sounds, introduced in a frequency- and distinguishability-weighted order.
- Stage 2 — CVC decoding. Short-vowel consonant-vowel-consonant words and the first decodable sentences.
- Stage 3 — Expanded phonics. Digraphs, blends, silent-e, vowel teams, r-controlled vowels, soft c/g, diphthongs.
- Stage 4 — Fluency. Repeated reading, choral reading, prosody; end-of-Grade-1 target is 60 WCPM with 95%+ accuracy.
- Stage 5 — Comprehension. Predicting, questioning, visualizing, summarizing, inferring.
- Stage 6 — Independent reading. Chapter books, reading volume tracking, dialogic prompts for parents.