Most reading apps pick a half. This one teaches both.
Phonics apps drill sounds and never arrive at
meaning. Comprehension apps hand a child passages and hope. Neither can
tell you whether your child is stuck on decoding, on vocabulary, or on
working out what a paragraph is actually saying - which are three
different problems with three different answers.
✓ Kindergarten → 8th grade -
rhyming and letter sounds through theme, evidence, and an author's
point of view.
✓ Eight strands, tracked separately -
decoding, vocabulary, literature, nonfiction, content-area reading,
grammar, writing, and fluency.
✓ Reading in science and social
studies - practice inference on a passage about photosynthesis or
the Erie Canal, and come away knowing the science and the history too.
✓ Read-aloud on every early
question - so a five-year-old who cannot yet decode the prompt can
still answer what it asks.
$12.99/month
- every strand, every grade, unlimited practice, one
subscription. No paywall between a struggling reader and the unit that
would fix it.
Free during our Founding Family beta - no card required.
A plan, not a percentage
The placement does not hand you a score. It says which
reading stage your child is at, why we say so, and the next few things
to work on - each with the reason it comes next and how long it takes.
Knowledge graph
Every skill is linked to what it depends on. A lesson
appears only when your child is ready for it, and never repeats what
they already know.
Spaced repetition
Reviews arrive on expanding intervals - and practicing an
advanced skill ripples credit down to the foundations underneath it, so
nothing is reviewed for the sake of it.
Built by a professor - not a growth team
Lit Ladder is designed by its founder - a PhD and
Full Professor of Computer Engineering and an internationally
recognized researcher with 25 years of university-level teaching
experience. The mastery model, prerequisite knowledge graph, and
spaced-repetition engine draw on mastery learning, retrieval practice, and
interleaving, and the reading curriculum is built on the evidence base for
explicit, systematic phonics alongside deliberate work on vocabulary and
comprehension. He used AI as his engineering partner to design and code the
expert system.
Looking for math? Its sister site is MathLadderAI.com →
Sounds, not just letters
The early units are built around the difference that
trips readers up for years: ship is four letters and three
sounds. Sound boxes make it visible, and a read-aloud button means a
pre-reader is never blocked by the question itself.
Every wrong answer means something
Distractors are not filler. Each one is the answer a
child gives while holding a specific misconception - matched the first
sound instead of the last, counted letters instead of sounds, picked a
true detail instead of the main idea.
Original passages
Every text is written for this course, checked against
the grade level it claims, and paired with questions that have one
defensible answer and a recorded reason for it.
Reading across subjects
From second grade on, comprehension practice runs on real
science and social studies - life cycles, food chains, the Underground
Railroad, the seventy-two years to the Nineteenth Amendment. Reading
practice and learning something are the same sitting.
Mistake Notebook
Every definitive miss is filed, re-taught, redone, and
finally sealed with a fresh question days later - mistakes are
the curriculum, not red ink.
Honest about what it knows
Where the evidence is thin, the report says so. Strong
decoding with comprehension unmeasured reports as transitional,
never fluent - overstating a reading level is what sends a child
into books they cannot access.
