Parents of preschoolers often go around with a low-level anxiety about whether their kids are learning how to read. This makes sense. There’s reams of evidence showing that early literacy is connected with success in school, and later, in the workplace. But learning how to read is a complicated process, and many parents feel ill-equipped to teach their toddlers how to decode words.
A startup called Lovevery wants to help. The company—fueled by $131 million in VC funding—is known for designing educational toys for each stage of early childhood, from birth to age five. Today, it launches The Reading Skill Set, which is designed to teach children how to read. The brand’s approach is grounded in phonics—an approach that connects sounds to letters. But the company tries to make the learning process fun through games. When a child has worked their way through the three kits, they should be able to read chapter books on their own.
Together the three-part Lovevery reading kits costs $420, although each part can be purchased individually for $155 a piece. This is more expensive than many other reading systems available at bookstorxes. But the products should appeal to the educated, affluent families that Lovevery has served thus far.
America’s Literacy Crisis
Lovevery was founded by Jessica Rolph and Roderick Morris. They launched the startup because they felt underprepared to help their own children to achieve their developmental milestones as infants and babies.
They partnered with educators and researchers to create boxes of toys that are designed to support the brain development of babies, from the time their parents bring them home from the hospital. Each box comes with a detailed booklet for parents so they understand how their child is growing, and how to best use each toy. The curriculum is grounded in the Montessori approach, which is designed to foster independence in the child.
As they grow the company, Rolph and Morris want to create tools for older children. And the obvious next stage of development was reading. But as they began to do research on literacy, they discovered that America is in the midst of a crisis.
According to the 2022 results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 33% of fourth graders in the United States are proficient at reading. The pandemic appears to have aggravated the problem. In 2019, 35% of fourth graders had mastered reading. “We felt like we could help tackle this problem,” says Rolph. “We could create tools that help kids learn these foundational skills.”
Experts believe there are many reasons that American kids are failing to learn how to read. Part of it has to do with socio-economics. Children from low-income backgrounds have less access to books and educational support, which hinders their ability to read. Immigrant families don’t have enough resources to help their children learn to read in English. And the school shutdowns during the pandemic compounded learning losses.
But another reason for this crisis is that many American educators are using outdated approaches to teach reading. There is evidence that the most effective way to teach literacy is through phonics, which helps kids decode words by understanding the sounds that the letters make.
Over the past two decades, however, a competing approach to teaching reading emerged. It’s called “cuing,” and encourages children to guess unfamiliar words in sentences based on context or pictures, rather than through learning the underlying structure of the words. The educators who developed this approach believed this method would be more enjoyable and empowering to kids than the more laborious task of sounding out words through phonics. And proponents of cuing believe that this approach gives kids more positive associations with reading and a lifelong love of books.
However, there’s mounting research that many kids who follow the cuing approach never fully master reading. This is why 15 states—including Tennessee, Alabama, and North Carolina—have passed legislation to overhaul their reading curriculum and train teachers in evidence-based, phonics-focused reading instruction.
Making Phonics Fun
Rolph and Morris became aware of the battles around literacy through an influential podcast called “Sold a Story” that launched in 2022. The podcast sent shock waves through the education system, and kick-started much of the legislation that is currently underway to push for phonics-based education in schools.
The Lovevery team recognized that phonics was now the most evidence-based approach to teaching kids to read. But they also realized that it had a reputation for being boring. “We wanted to see if we could find a way to make it engaging for kids,” says Rolph.
The Lovevery team convened a panel of reading experts and researchers from the National Foundation for Literacy Development, the New York Public Library, and Montessori, among other organizations. Together, they designed kits that take children through the process of learning to read from the very earliest steps of identifying letters and sounds.
One thing you won’t find in the boxes is anything electronic. This is very deliberate. Lovevery’s approach is to provide an alternative to so much of the screen-based learning that is on the market. As Lovevery was developing these kits, it surveyed more than a thousand parents of children between the ages of 4 and 8. It found that only 10% of parents considered screen-based literacy programs to be effective.
The kits come with books appropriate for each reading level. The most basic ones just have a few simple words that kids can sound out, and at the highest level, there are more elaborate 80-page stories broken into chapters.
What really stands out with the Lovevery system is that there are games for each stage, designed to teach phonics in a fun, entertaining way. In the first box, designed for preschoolers and kindergarteners, there are nine games. One, designed to teach syllables, involves a dog racing around a track; you tap the dog on the wooden track to hear each syllable of a word. In another, there are little cards that can be matched up to reveal new words; it’s meant to illustrate that words are made up of sound parts.
In the most advanced box, which is designed for first and second graders, there are four games that are more elaborate games. One board game is called “Ends With E,” and is meant to teach kids when adding an “e” at the end of a word changes the way it sounds. In another, you learn how vowels work together by balancing little penguin figurines on an iceberg.
Morris points out that these games are crucial to helping kids stay excited about reading. Lovevery’s survey found that 38% of parents observe negative behaviors and emotions in their children, as they were learning how to read. “One thing we learned in our research is how important it is for children to remain motivated while they learn to read,” he says. “So we thought about how we could making this process fun. We built these prototypes and tested them on kids, so they stay engaged enough to keep moving through the material and acquiring skills.”
Helping Parents Out
Importantly, there are booklets in every box that explains every part of the reading process to parents. This is important Morris says, because many parents feel overwhelmed and unprepared to teach their children how to read.
Lovevery’s survey found that almost all parents are directly involved in helping their children how to read because they believe that reading is a key to overall success in life. But at the same time, a quarter of parents feel negatively about the process of teaching their kids to read, because they don’t feel like they know what they’re doing. And only a third of parents were familiar with teaching phonics.
These boxes are likely to appeal to the many educated parents who are anxious about teaching their kids reading skills. But they’re also out of reach to families in under-resourced communities, whose kids are most likely to struggle with reading. With this in mind, Lovevery is partnering with Reading Is Fundamental, a nonprofit that encourages reading, by donating a book to a child in need for every purchase of the The Reading Skill Set.
Rolph and Morris acknowledge that access to their products can be a challenge. And ultimately, tackling the reading crisis in the United States requires giving preschoolers from all socio-economic backgrounds the chance to learn reading at a young age. This may be starting to happen, as legislation goes into effect, forcing all school districts to adopt more evidence-based approaches to literacy. But there’s still a long way to go.