Back to hubBuilt on the Science of Reading.
Not opinions. Not trends.
Every coaching response your child hears is grounded in five decades of converging research from cognitive science, linguistics, and reading instruction — the same evidence base used by reading specialists, SLPs, and trained K teachers.
The frameworks we follow
The four pillars our coach stands on
National Reading Panel (2000)
Identified the five essential pillars of reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Every coaching response we generate is mapped to these pillars.
Scarborough's Reading Rope
Skilled reading is two intertwined strands — word recognition (phonological awareness, decoding, sight recognition) and language comprehension (background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, literacy knowledge). Our coach rotates across all strands.
The Simple View of Reading
Reading Comprehension = Decoding × Language Comprehension. Both factors must be present. Your coaching prompts intentionally build both.
Science of Reading
Five decades of converging research from cognitive science, linguistics, neuroscience, and education on how the brain learns to read. Not a program — a body of evidence.
What the coach actually teaches
Five NRP pillars + the foundations underneath them
Every micro-coaching moment rotates across these areas — so your child isn't just hearing the same trick twice.
Phonemic Awareness
Hearing and playing with the individual sounds in spoken words — the #1 predictor of early reading success.
Phonics
Mapping sounds to letters so children can decode words instead of guessing.
Fluency
Reading with accuracy, speed, and expression so the brain is free to think about meaning.
Vocabulary
Knowing thousands of words — built through real talk, rich books, and Tier-2 word teaching.
Comprehension
Understanding, connecting, and reasoning about what was read — the goal of all reading.
Print & Oral Language
Conversations, storytelling, and noticing print in the world build the foundation everything else sits on.
The researchers behind the coach
We don't just cite one expert. We rotate the best.
Our coach is explicitly instructed to draw across the full evidence base — not lean on a single name or method.
Linnea Ehri
Phases of word reading & orthographic mapping
David Kilpatrick
Advanced phoneme awareness & reading difficulty
Louisa Moats
Teaching the structure of English (LETRS)
Marilyn Adams
Beginning to Read — foundational synthesis
Hollis Scarborough
Scarborough's Reading Rope
Philip Gough & William Tunmer
Simple View of Reading
Mark Seidenberg
Reading science & cognitive models
Anne Castles, Kathleen Rastle & Kate Nation
Ending the Reading Wars (2018)
Hallie Yopp
Phonemic awareness assessment & instruction
Isabel Beck & Margaret McKeown
Tier-2 vocabulary & Text Talk
Betty Hart & Todd Risley
Early talk & the 30-million-word gap
E.D. Hirsch
Background knowledge & comprehension
John Guthrie
Engaged reading & CORI framework
Allan Wigfield
Reading motivation & expectancy-value theory
Timothy Rasinski
Fluency through repeated reading
S. Jay Samuels
Automaticity in reading
Laura Justice & Helen Ezell
Print referencing in shared reading
Catherine Snow, M. Susan Burns & Peg Griffin
Preventing Reading Difficulties (NRC)
Nell Duke & Kelly Cartwright
The Active View of Reading
Andrew Biemiller
Vocabulary development & sequencing
Gina Cervetti & Elfrieda Hiebert
Knowledge-building & vocabulary
Susan Brady
Phonology & reading acquisition
Grover (Russ) Whitehurst
Dialogic reading (used sparingly, alongside phonics)
The same evidence-based research you would use in a program to earn a master's in Reading.
You're not getting parenting hacks. You're getting the research that the best reading specialists in the country use — translated into one-minute moments at the dinner table, in the car, and at the grocery store.