4 Steps: Learn How to Teach Your Students to Read With TIPS Now

A Simple Solution to Get Students Reading Faster, Easier, and With More Joy

TIPS™ is a set of training wheels for learning to read. You put them on and reading becomes easy immediately. Kids have fun because they get the answer right. They move quickly, build confidence, and start to read vocabulary on sight, automatically. At that point, the TIPS™ come off and the students can read at full speed on traditional text.

I read because Ī lôvд ā grдāt störƭ. Ī wƤnt tŏ lдаŕn. it unlocйs döнrś. Ī wƤnt tŏ grōх. it iś sŭpдŕ fun.

Reading with TIPS™ fundamentally changes the approach to early reading. Students learn a handful of markings and can, almost immediately, begin decoding and reading meaningful text. This inverts the process of traditional literacy programs. Content comes first. Books come first. Comprehension comes first. All because decoding becomes effortless for every word in English.

FASTER PROGRESS

TIPS™ is deeply logical and linear, in a way that traditional English literacy programs are not. This breaks down the "wall" and allows students to make steady, rapid progress.

LESS EFFORT

TIPS™ is designed to reduce the cognitive load required to read, so it takes less effort both for the student to learn and the teacher to teach. It's easier all around.

MORE FUN

Reading is fun, but learning to read can be a huge struggle. TIPS™ gives students the tools to be successful, making the learning process far more enjoyable.

Four Easy Steps to Fluency

Learning to read with TIPS is incredibly easy. These five steps describe everything you need to know to understand the fundamentals of the system.

Learn the Letters and TIPS

The first step in the reading journey starts with letters and their sounds. Normally, this means learning the “A” in CAT and calling it a day. But what about the “A” in AIR? or SMALL? or TUNA? or FAR?

With TIPS, students learn every sound they need to read every word in English. But some letters and TIPS are a lot more important than others. So we also organize the TIPS into Levels, based on how often they are used in English. The most common letter-sound combinations are taught first, allowing students to quickly develop the skills needed to read tens of thousands of words.

Blend Sounds into Words

The first step in the reading journey starts with letters and their sounds. Normally, this means learning the “A” in CAT and calling it a day. But what about the “A” in AIR? or SMALL? or TUNA? or FAR?

With TIPS, since there are no exceptions to pronunciation, every single word can be decoded with a simple sound-it-out process. Kids don’t have to look ahead and guess the pattern, or memorize hundreds of sight words. Instead, children learn to decode words, moving from left to right and making the right sound for each letter as it appears in that particular word.

Become a Rapid Decoder

The first two steps give your child the building blocks, next comes mastery. Through practice, they will pick up speed at decoding words they haven’t seen before and over time begin to memorize the patterns of sounds that exist in our language.

This allows natural memories to form, via the act of reading, of how letters and sounds work together to make words. This is called the act of “self-teaching” and is the fundamental driver of literacy acquisition.

Transition to Traditional Reading

Now we are really moving! Students at this step can rapidly decode any word they see. The words they have seen frequently can be read automatically, with or without TIPS™. It’s a very different process from the normal memorization of sight words. High frequency words are learned naturally through the course of reading meaningful text.

At this point, the TIPS™ begin to come off. The font sizes of books is reduced, minimizing the TIPS for every word, and they are intentionally removed for high frequency words and words repeated within a given text.

Case Study

Rapid Progress Reading with TIPS™

In the Fall of 2020, pilot data was collected from our early adopters. The results point to the clear potential of TIPS™ as a transformational alternative to traditional reading intervention strategies:

Study Overview: 6 weeks intervention, 7 teachers, 36 students. Mix of digital and in-person settings.
21% of students experienced “light-speed” performance gains. Many high-potential students are simply held back by the complexity of typical English instruction.
Students showed significant improvement across every aspect of early literacy development measured.
Assessments measured progress with traditional text, demonstrating immediate transfer to “regular” reading.

 5/5

I’m a teacher with a daughter who struggled to read. I tried so many things to help her, but still she fell behind. Then we started with TIPS. It is like magic watching her now transform into a blossoming early reader.

Christina Chan

Kindergarten Teacher

Learning Resources

Learning to read takes a world of content that you can use to surround your child, including books, worksheets, flash cards, and activities and lessons designed so that your students makes steady progress.

Tutoring

One on one tutoring is the most effective way for students to make rapid progress learning to read with TIPS™.

Explorer Portal

The Explorer Portal is a digital teaching studio with built in lesson plans, practice sets, and other teaching aids to use with your students.

Reading World

Reading World is a digital learning adventure that can be used independently or in concert with other tools for blended learning.

Digital Library

The digital library includes over 50 leveled readers designed to promote early literacy through systematic introduction of TIPS™.

Curriculum

The Reading with TIPS™ curriculum includes over 50 lesson plans to guide students’ from letter sounds to independent reading.

Worksheets

Over 100 worksheets are available to allow students to develop competency and demonstrate mastery of key early reading concepts.

Flash Cards

Flash cards introduce TIPS™ to students, promote rapid letter-sound learning and help develop fundamental word reading skills.

Classroom Pack

The Classroom Pack is a large format set of flash cards that can be used in a group setting to engage an entire class in reading with TIPS™.

The Science Behind TIPS

TIPS™ is built on the foundation of critical, recent discoveries in the science of reading that have helped us understand exactly why learning to read is so difficult for so many students.

The Challenge

English is Uniquely Difficult Because of our Spelling System.

English spelling is so complex that it is viewed in research as a true outlier to other alphabetic languages (Share 2008, Aro 2005).

This complexity plays a direct role in the reading development of English-text readers, including slower reading-accuracy and phonemic awareness development (Galletly 2004).

The Impact

English takes years longer to learn than simpler languages.

English spelling is so complex that it is viewed in research as a true outlier to other alphabetic languages (Share 2008, Aro 2005).

This complexity plays a direct role in the reading development of English-text readers, including slower reading-accuracy and phonemic awareness development (Galletly 2004).

The Outcome

Most Students in School Will Never Master Reading at Grade Level.

65% of students in the US do not read at grade-level proficiency by 4th grade. (NAEP Report Card, 2019)

The challenges imposed by English orthography fall disproportionately on the low-achieving students (Spencer & Hanley, 2003).

The impact is severe, because when a student fails, the interventions we try are less effective than those to students in more transparent orthographies (Vellutino, 2000).