Based on your child’s choices, this app generates short, engaging stories tailored to your child's grade level and reading abilities. The stories use carefully controlled vocabulary and sentence structure to provide appropriate reading practice at your child's skill level.

Children learn to read at their own pace, but as parents and caregivers, we want to offer them all the support they need to succeed. If you are wondering how to start a reading program that will match your child’s potential, start with an early reading assessment like the Sharpen Early Advantage Assessment.

With the assessment data, the next step is starting a reading program. The Sharpen Reading Program offers a multi-sensory, structured literacy program that is divided into manageable lessons starting at the Pre-K level.  Take the Sharpen Reading Assessment to find out what level your child will start.  Progress is divided with clear guideposts and Sharpen Reading provides regular progress monitoring, so you can start with your child and let them progress at the pace they excel at within the program.

If you suspect that your child may have dyslexia, it's vital to have them assessed as early as possible. Dyslexia is a specific learning disorder that primarily affects reading and writing skills, and early intervention can greatly benefit children with dyslexia. According to the International Dyslexia Association (IDA), screenings should be used beginning in kindergarten but there can be signs years earlier, including family history factors and delays in language and pre-literacy skill development.  Risk screening allows parents, teachers, and tutors to identify students at risk for reading difficulty and provide additional support, including targeted intervention, to those who need it. After a pre-reading assessment, starting an evidence-based reading program for dyslexia early in your child’s education positions them to make significant gains to overcome learning difficulties while their optimal window for learning is open and before they experience reading struggles in school.

The best online reading programs for struggling readers offer carefully designed and sequenced reading instruction, cover all relevant skills, and integrate those skills in a structured, systematic way. They also offer extensive progress and performance monitoring, which results in data-driven insights and records for parents and caregivers. Sharpen Reading Program easily meets all of these qualifications and much more.

A well-developed online reading program works. Often, the roadblocks to a successful online reading program are issues on the periphery of the actual program. Scheduling difficulties, monitoring delays, and pacing issues can all hinder success. Sharpen Reading Program is structured to pace according to the individual progress of the child and is designed to be completely flexible with your family’s schedule. The precise progress tracking and adaptive learning embedded in the program allows you to see measured improvements in your child’s reading skills in real-time. With Sharpen Reading, you’ll know the program is working.

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A high-quality online program is a result of high-quality and evidence-based research to gather a multi-dimensional understanding of a child’s reading problems. A comprehensive reading system should include multiple elements:

• the instruction is oriented from speech to print (and not from print to speech)
  
• the instruction is systematic and comprehensive
• the instruction provides ample practice for students to develop advanced skills to identify and manipulate individual speech sounds (phonemes) in words
• the instruction provides ample practice reading extended texts

These elements are explicitly presented in Sharpen Reading.

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An online reading program can be especially effective for struggling readers because it can incorporate multi-sensory components (visual, auditory, and kinesthetic/tactile) that can help to better process and retain information, as well as strengthen their reading skills. Additionally, students with learning difficulties such as dyslexia, attention problems, and general cognitive impairments or delays need comprehensive and direct instruction. Carefully sequenced lessons and instructional language that is simple but precise are also very helpful. Sharpen Reading provides all of this. Multi-sensory, structured literacy benefits all students, not just struggling readers, which makes Sharpen Reading a great option for any family looking to support their child’s reading skills.

An online reading program of Sharpen Reading's caliber offers reading instruction that is carefully designed and sequenced to ensure that all relevant skills are being properly integrated in a systematic and structured approach. By utilizing interactive and engaging activities, children remain attentive and the reading experience is more effective. Furthermore, the digital program offers extensive progress and performance monitoring resulting in data-driven insights and records for parents. This data can be used for more tailored instruction and more targeted support for each child.

Sharpen Reading is designed around the principles of the science of reading. Proven to be effective with all kinds of readers, including those with reading problems or dyslexia, Sharpen Reading incorporates research from various disciplines to facilitate the reading acquisition process. Sharpen Reading focuses on four key elements:

• Phonemic Awareness: Understanding that words comprise individual sounds.
• Phonics: Knowledge of the relationships between letters and the sounds they represent.
• Explicit Instruction: Systematic teaching of reading components to nurture proficient readers.
• Varied Practice: Frequent exposure in multiple ways to words solidifies their memory.

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Online tutoring is a convenient and cost-effective way to provide your child with additional academic support while saving money and time compared to traditional in-person tutoring. When looking for reading tutoring, especially for elementary students, it's essential to ensure that the curriculum has a proven track record of teaching children how to read and is based on the Science of Reading. Additionally, the digital platform should be engaging to maintain your child's interest with challenging and fun activities. It's also important that the tutors are certified and enjoy working with children. Finally, progress monitoring is crucial to know how your child is improving, making it a critical factor to consider before investing in online tutoring.

Tutoring sessions are held over Zoom and are 45 minutes. Parents help their Learner log into Sharpen Reading, our purpose-built digital platform, and then share their screen. Once a session begins, parents are only needed if the Learner experiences computer issues. With Kindergarten students, we ask parents to sit with their child for at least the first few sessions.

The Tutor will guide the Learner through our series of carefully sequenced activities built on the Science of Reading. Activities are paced to optimize student engagement and deep learning and include sounding out words and word parts, performing tasks with letter tiles while connecting those sounds to letters and letter combinations (decoding). Activities are designed to leverage the most proven, most effective ways to teach core decoding skills. With fun names like Word Puzzle, Tap and Say and Breaking Words Apart, students are actually building their foundational orthographic map and practicing critical skills like sound discrimination, phoneme manipulation and phonemic awareness.

Our goal is to accommodate the needs of our students and their families. Parents can choose to schedule two or three sessions per week around times that are convenient for both you and your child. The goal is to set a consistent schedule each month which ensures that your family can plan times that work for you, while also not looking too far out in the future. Since lessons are conducted online and from the comfort of your own home, no time is wasted on travel.

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Ensuring the success and progress of our students is a top priority. We use a comprehensive approach to monitor and assess your child’s progress through a combination of personal feedback and technology-driven assessments. Here's how.

Direct Tutor Feedback:
Our tutors maintain detailed notes on each student's learning journey. After every tutoring session, tutors complete session feedback forms that include observations and insights. This personalized feedback highlights the student's strengths, areas for improvement, and any significant milestones reached during the lesson.

Evaluation Activities:
We also utilize the advanced capabilities of Sharpen's digital reading platform. The Sharpen Tutoring Platform includes specific activities to evaluate a student's grasp of the skills they have been learning. Activities such as Flash Card and Sound Game are scored, providing objective feedback on the student's performance

Based on your child’s choices, this app generates short, engaging stories tailored to your child's grade level and reading abilities. The stories use carefully controlled vocabulary and sentence structure to provide appropriate reading practice at your child's skill level.

You pick your child's grade level, kindergarten through third grade currently available, and your child's reading ability, (whether or not your child struggles with reading), Based on this information, we match stories at your child's reading level. If the stories are too hard or too easy, you can adjust the reading level by re-selecting the grade level.

Yes, the app is designed to create stories with themes and content suitable for each grade level. The stories avoid harmful situations and inappropriate language.

Yes. The app does not collect or store any personally identifiable information about your child. It simply generates stories based on grade level and child-selected story elements. Please see Sharpen’s Terms of Service for details.

The stories are generated as your child interacts with the app. You can sit with your child and read the stories together to provide support and share in the experience.

The app is designed to provide reading practice to reinforce skills your child is learning at school and with Sharpen Reading. It is not intended as a holistic reading curriculum but as a complementary tool to practice and strengthen reading skills and build fluency.

It can be hard to know if your child, especially at the preschool or kindergarten level, may benefit from a reading assessment. Instead of waiting for a reading struggle to surface with your child, detect potential challenges early. The Sharpen Early Advantage Assessment not only provides a direct measurement of a child's reading skills, it also includes language, literacy, and family history risk assessments.

If you know that your child is struggling to read, the next step is to determine the best way to support your child’s learning process. There are myriad choices, from hiring a private tutor to downloading an app to buying a stack of workbooks. A straightforward and comprehensive assessment will provide a roadmap for you and your child. The Sharpen Early Advantage Assessment results are multimodal, combining your child’s results to convey your child’s risk level and provide clear recommendations for the best next steps and resources.

Often, children are discovered to have reading challenges as they proceed through early elementary school. As they encounter the threshold of their understanding, it becomes evident that they need additional support, and often screenings follow. But, what if a child was screened at an early age for important risk factors? The Sharpen Early Advantage Assessment does precisely this. There is no age requirement for the Early Advantage Assessment. The Family History Screen can be taken at any age. For children between ages 2 and 5 years of age, the Early Language Screen offers pre-literacy insight, while the Early Literacy Screen is designed to assess children between 4 and 8 years old.

You do not need to worry if you made one error when completing an assessment online. Our scoring algorithm is flexible to few questions answered incorrectly. However, we encourage you to provide your best answers to as many questions as possible for the most accurate results. You will also have the ability to revisit the question(s) and provide accurate information.

Early language problems are one of the most significant and earliest predictors of reading problems. Many high quality, peer reviewed studies have shown that children with reading problems after Grade One are 2 to 3 times more likely to have had early language problems. The Early Language Assessment is designed to detect risk for language problems. It was developed through a systematic review of peer-reviewed literature. The assessment received item-level validation and empirical language risk predictions from a research study with hundreds of families, using parent-based reports of their child’s early language skills and challenges.

The Sharpen TPRI Reading Assessment directly assesses the child’s reading skills from Kindergarten through the end of Grade 2. The child's performance is scored to determine whether the child is likely not at risk or may be at risk for developing reading problems. The series of assessments are administered online to the child by a parent or caregiver. It is structured and available to be taken three times each year in Kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2. Each Sharpen TPRI Reading Assessment takes approximately 15 minutes to complete.

The Family History Assessment consists of two assessments. The Parent/Caregiver Challenges Assessment evaluates the caregivers’ past and current reading skills and challenges. The Biological Parent Risk Assessment collects and reports on data regarding the biological parents’ formal diagnoses of reading problems. They are both completed online by parents and/or caregivers. The Family History Assessment takes approximately 15 minutes to complete.

If you do not know the answer to any of the questions in an individual Sharpen assessment, you may click the “I don’t know” option. However, we encourage you to provide your best answers to as many questions as possible for the most accurate results. You will also have the ability to revisit the question(s) and provide up to date information.

The results of each online assessment will tell you if your child is at low, elevated, or high risk for developing reading problems based on the risk factor(s) measured in that assessment. It is important to keep in mind that individual assessment results are not a diagnosis of the child’s reading skill development. The results also do not tell you whether your child will or will not have reading problems in the future.

The Early Literacy Assessment evaluates the child's early literacy development. It is completed online by a parent/caregiver and collects information on the child's early reading milestones using behaviors that can be directly observed by a parent/caregiver. For children between 4 and 5 years of age, information on the child’s current literacy milestones are collected and analyzed. For children between 5 and 8 years of age, information about the child’s literacy milestones before the child’s 5th birthday are collected and analyzed. The Early Literacy Assessment takes approximately 15 minutes to complete.

The Early Language Assessment evaluates the child's language development relative to the performance expected for children in the same age range. It is completed online by a parent/caregiver and collects information on the child's early language milestones between 1 and 5 years of age using behaviors that can be directly observed by a parent/caregiver. For children between 2 and 4 years of age, the assessment is repeated every 6 months in order to measure and monitor language development progress. The Early Language Assessment takes approximately 15 minutes to complete.

Children with reading problems are more likely to have a parent or caregiver with reading problems due to the genetic source of reading and the learning environment that children tend to share with their caregivers/parents. Multiple high quality, peer-reviewed studies show that children with reading problems after Grade One are 3 to 4 times more likely to have a caregiver or parent with reading problems. The Family History Assessment is designed to detect risk for reading problems in parents or caregivers. It was developed through a systematic review of peer-reviewed literature. The assessment received item-level validation and empirical predictions of caregiver/parent risk from a research study with hundreds of families, using parent-based reports of their own reading skills and challenges.

Early screening of a child’s reading skill level is critical for preventing lifelong reading struggles. Multiple high quality, peer-reviewed studies show that early screening and early identification of reading problems is an important first step towards improving the outcomes of struggling readers. The TPRI effectively screens for potential reading problems during the earliest school years. It was designed, validated, and licensed from the Children’s Learning Institute of the University of Texas Health Center, a leading education and children’s health center in the United States. The assessment has been used in hundreds of school districts across the country.

Children typically develop literacy milestones at expected developmental stages. Multiple high quality, peer-reviewed studies have shown that children with reading problems after Grade One are 5 to 9 times more likely to have had early problems with print, letters, and letter-sounds and 3 to 5 times more likely to have had problems with early oral language. The Early Literacy Assessment is designed to detect risk for reading problems. It was developed through a systematic review of peer-reviewed literature. The assessment received item-level validation and empirical reading risk prediction from a research study with hundreds of families, using parent-based reports of their child’s early reading skills and challenges.

No. Sharpen will never share your personal information with third parties without your explicit consent. When you participate in the Sharpen Research Program any personal information you provided during registration, such as name, address or payment information, is excluded from analysis. If data are published or shared with qualified research collaborators, only summaries of research results or pooled data that do not identify any research participant will be shared. In addition, you are always in control of your data. For example, you may choose to share assessment results with specific family members, friends, or education professionals. At any time, you can stop sharing your records. Similarly, you can unsubscribe from the Sharpen Research Program or request that we delete specific information or all the information associated with your personal Sharpen account. For more information see our full Privacy Statement.

You may cancel your order by contacting our Customer Service and receive a refund of the purchase price minus any applicable shipping and handling fee if you notify us within thirty (30) days of your order that you no longer wish to use our service. For services including a swab collection kit, the unopened kit must be returned to us within thirty (30) days from the date you requested the refund. You will not receive any refund if your swab samples have already been returned to us for processing. For subscription-based services, you shall notify Sharpen of your intention to cancel your subscription at least seven (7) days before the next scheduled payment in your billing cycle. You will have access to the services until the end of the existing subscription period and will not be charged after the termination of your subscription at the end of that period. Purchases of printed material such as instructional materials, books, or curricula, are non-refundable.

One of Sharpen's missions is to give to anyone using our services the opportunity to participate in relevant scientific research. Sharpen’s research studies are overseen by an independent ethics review board and are performed exclusively on data that have been stripped of any personal identifiable information. If you choose to participate, Sharpen researchers and qualified research collaborators will use de-identified data to study potential links between genetic markers, learning skills, learning traits, and/or other learning characteristics. The output of this research could lead to a better understanding of learning problems and earlier detection and intervention. Our goal is to improve learning outcomes for all children.

Your privacy is very important to us. We use industry-leading authentication and security practices. All data is encrypted when they are stored and when they are being transmitted. To further protect your identity, your personal information and your raw genetic data are stored in distinct databases that have restricted access to minimum essential personnel.

You will need a computer or personal device, a valid email address, and access to the internet to create an account and use the services.

For online ordering we accept all major credit cards: American Express, Discover, MasterCard, and Visa. Please remember that only one payment source may be used to cover the entire amount of your purchase and the billing address you provide must match the address associated with your credit card.

Adults over the age of 18 can create a Sharpen account and benefit from our services. Users must be a parent or a legally authorized representative to collect swab samples from a minor under the age of 18 and to submit their personal information to Sharpen. The Genetic Reading Trait Report is currently only available in the United States of America.