Why your child will want to read with you

Before the first lesson, most parents ask the same question: how do I get a four-year-old to want to do this? There are three answers. The first is you. The second is getting things right, which the lessons are built to make easy. The third is anything you choose to add, and that choice is yours.

Your child wants to be with you

A small child does not sit down to learn the sound /m/. They sit down because you asked, because the two of you are about to do something together, and because it feels good to do something well while you watch. To a four-year-old, ten minutes on the couch with your full attention is a good thing all by itself. That is why the lessons are written for you to teach, and it is most of what brings your child back each day.

The research agrees. A review of sixteen family reading studies found that children gained the most when their parents taught them specific reading skills. They gained less when parents listened to them read, and less again when parents read to them. A second review found that the time parents and preschoolers spend reading together predicts how well the child speaks and reads later on, with a moderate effect.

Sources: Sénéchal and Young 2008 · Bus, van IJzendoorn and Pellegrini 1995

Getting it right keeps them going

Wanting to be with you gets a child through the first week. What brings them back after that is getting things right. Reading well and wanting to read grow together. A review of studies that followed children from their first years of reading found that the children who read better early on wanted to read more later, and that children who struggled early lost interest. Stanovich called the long-run version of this the Matthew effect: children who read well read more, and reading more makes them better still.

So the lessons are made easy to get right. Each step adds one small thing to what your child already knows, and the steps are set so that a child answers correctly about four times in five, the rate the research on explicit teaching recommends for new material. On a story day, your child reads a whole story from the first word to the last, because every word in it uses only the sounds they have learned. Finishing it is the reward: your child just read a book.

A mistake is handled quietly. You say the sound, your child says it back, and the word comes up again a little later. There is no "good try", no explanation, and no sad noise from the screen. Daniel Willingham's point in Why Don't Students Like School? is that people enjoy solving problems that take some effort and that they can solve. The pleasure is in the solving. The lesson's job is to keep your child at that level of difficulty.

Sources: Morgan and Fuchs 2007 · Stanovich 1986 · Rosenshine 2012 · Willingham 2009

Some days are hard, and that is normal

Ten minutes is a long time for a small child, and some days the lesson is over after four. Stop there. Nothing is lost. Tomorrow's lesson starts from where today's stopped, and the sounds that need more practice come back on their own. Three days a week is enough to make it a habit. When a lesson goes well, the app offers the next short one right away, and only then. A child who needed a second try on anything gets tomorrow's lesson tomorrow.

What you can add

When being with you and getting things right are not enough on a given day, here are four things to try, starting with the smallest.

• A quiet table. Phone face down, the television off, a sibling busy somewhere else, nothing on the screen but the lesson. Young children can hold fewer things in mind at once than adults, and everything else in the room takes some of that attention. The app is plain for the same reason: every animation, badge, and sound effect we left out leaves more attention for reading.
• A snack that comes with the lesson and does not have to be earned. One of us keeps a bowl of blueberries on the table during reading time and calls it Berries and Brains. The berries are there because it is reading time. Nobody earns them. The research on rewards makes exactly this distinction. A review of 128 experiments found that rewards children had to earn by doing, finishing, or doing well at an activity made them less likely to choose that activity on their own afterward. Rewards that did not depend on the activity at all had no such effect. A snack on the table is the second kind.
• Tell them what their work has done. "Last week 'raincoat' was hard. Look at you now." Children who hear that their effort produced the result go on to work harder and expect more of themselves than children who are told they are smart. Parents who praised the work and the method when their children were one to three had children who, five years later, believed that ability grows with effort. The app gives you what you need for this. At the end of each lesson it tells you what your child learned today, in words you can say out loud, and the home screen keeps a simple count of sounds, words, stories, and days read this week.
• A reward for doing the lesson or for finishing a story. Blueberries after the lesson. "Do Rumpus four times this week and we pick out a Lego minifigure." A sticker for every story read alone. Parents have heard a warning about this, so here is what the research says. The best-known study, from 1973, found that preschoolers who were promised a certificate for drawing drew less on their own afterward than children who got nothing or got a surprise. The 1999 review found the same pattern, and found it stronger in children than in college students. Another review of the same studies found the risk small and easy to avoid, and researchers still disagree.

Read the studies closely, though, and the effect applies only to something the child already likes doing. Nobody is born wanting to learn /ai/. A four-year-old cannot yet see what the sound is for, and a reward can keep them going until the stories do that job themselves. So use one if your child needs one. Give it for doing the lesson or for finishing a story, never for getting answers right. Keep it small, and plan to use it less as reading becomes its own reward. One of us runs a sticker chart at home for books read alone: ten stickers become a dollar, and the dollar buys a book.

Sources: Sweller 1988 · Alloway and Alloway 2010 · Deci, Koestner and Ryan 1999 · Schunk 1983 · Mueller and Dweck 1998 · Gunderson et al. 2013 · Lepper, Greene and Nisbett 1973 · Cameron and Pierce 1994

Why we leave this to you

Most reading apps answer the motivation question for you with points, streaks, and a cartoon friend who cheers. We left all of that out, for two reasons. Those things take your child's attention away from reading. And they keep the reward inside the app, where you cannot make it smaller when your child stops needing it.

Everything above is yours to decide: the quiet table, the berries, the words you choose, the minifigure. You know your child and what they need today, and you can do less as reading becomes its own reward. The app asks one thing of you in return: tap Got it and Try again honestly, so that next week's story is one your child can read.

Sources

1. Sénéchal and Young (2008). The effect of family literacy interventions on children's acquisition of reading from kindergarten to grade 3: A meta-analytic review. Review of Educational Research 78(4), 880-907. doi.org/10.3102/0034654308320319
2. Bus, van IJzendoorn and Pellegrini (1995). Joint book reading makes for success in learning to read: A meta-analysis on intergenerational transmission of literacy. Review of Educational Research 65(1), 1-21. doi.org/10.3102/00346543065001001
3. Morgan and Fuchs (2007). Is there a bidirectional relationship between children's reading skills and reading motivation? Exceptional Children 73(2), 165-183. doi.org/10.1177/001440290707300203
4. Stanovich (1986). Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly 21(4), 360-407. doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.21.4.1
5. Rosenshine (2012). Principles of instruction: Research-based strategies that all teachers should know. American Educator 36(1), 12-19, 39. Article (PDF)
6. Willingham (2009). Why Don't Students Like School? Jossey-Bass.
7. Sweller (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science 12(2), 257-285. doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog1202_4
8. Alloway and Alloway (2010). Investigating the predictive roles of working memory and IQ in academic attainment. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 106(1), 20-29. doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2009.11.003
9. Deci, Koestner and Ryan (1999). A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. Psychological Bulletin 125(6), 627-668. doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.125.6.627
10. Schunk (1983). Ability versus effort attributional feedback: Differential effects on self-efficacy and achievement. Journal of Educational Psychology 75(6), 848-856. doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.75.6.848
11. Mueller and Dweck (1998). Praise for intelligence can undermine children's motivation and performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75(1), 33-52. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.75.1.33
12. Gunderson, Gripshover, Romero, Dweck, Goldin-Meadow and Levine (2013). Parent praise to 1- to 3-year-olds predicts children's motivational frameworks 5 years later. Child Development 84(5), 1526-1541. doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12064
13. Lepper, Greene and Nisbett (1973). Undermining children's intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward: A test of the "overjustification" hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 28(1), 129-137. doi.org/10.1037/h0035519
14. Cameron and Pierce (1994). Reinforcement, reward, and intrinsic motivation: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research 64(3), 363-423. doi.org/10.3102/00346543064003363