For children who read slowly, need frequent help, or avoid reading.
A weekly session with an expert teacher, a science-of-reading curriculum with terrific original books, guided practice between sessions, and a weekly skills check to make sure they are on track and you know it. Pre- and post-assessment included.
See the program →1-on-1 Tutoring or Small Group of about 4. Your child can start this week!
Child in grade 6 or above? Explore our middle and high school reading program →
Your child might be just starting to hear the sounds in words, reading slowly and working hard at it, or reading fine and rarely choosing a book. Each of those is a stage of reading, not a verdict.
When a child avoids reading, it usually isn’t defiance. Reading hasn’t become easy enough to enjoy yet. Skill makes reading easier, easier reading builds confidence, and confidence makes a child want to read more. Every part of that is teachable.
A week in the loop
You do not need a bigger push. You need reading to become something that simply happens in your house, on its own schedule, with someone other than you keeping it moving.
That is a habit. Six weeks with a live teacher is enough time to build one.
Every book in the lessons is ours, created by our own curriculum team for our own programs, and written at a level that matches what your child is learning at school.
As the program progresses, the books become more challenging, building on what your child has learned.
The week starts with a live 50-minute class with an IRD Expert Teacher. The teacher introduces new skills every week, shows how they work, leads students through fun activities, and opens the week’s book with the group.
Your child reads, speaks up, and gets coached every session.
Between classes, your child completes four short online lessons, 15 to 20 minutes each. They read the week’s story with questions built in, and they reread the book.
Your child reads passages from this week’s book aloud, with guidance and modeling of how to read smoothly and expressively.
The week ends with a short skills check, so you and the teacher both see what landed before the next session. The next week’s class layers on top, and the loop continues.
The books
Every book your child reads is an IRD original, included as an ebook in the online lessons. The teacher opens the week’s book with the group in class, and your child reads it again in the lessons between classes.
Each grade has its own shelf of weekly books. The six books your child reads in the program will be consistent with the level of reading they currently have at school, and we will help them have successful experiences with each.
Pick the level your child is reading at.
Between classes, your child completes four short online lessons, 15 to 20 minutes each. They read the week’s story with questions built in. They learn new reading skills directly. They practice reading a passage from the story smoothly and with expression. Then they take the week’s skills check.
The skills check is the one scored piece at the end of each week, so the teacher sees what landed before the next class. Then the next week begins with more skills and a new story. That is how reading compounds, and why kids keep doing it.
Most advice about a reluctant reader is about motivation: wait until your child wants to read, or find a way to make them want to. Both get the order backward. Motivation is not where reading starts. It is what successful reading produces.
Skills make reading feel easier. The entry point is always skills, which is why this is live instruction and not encouragement.
Easier reading builds confidence. Good reading teachers plan for it: a book at the right level, enough support to get through the hard parts, and a real win in every session. A child’s confidence is built from that evidence, one win at a time.
Confidence makes a child want to read more. Neuroscience confirms the order reading teachers see every day: the brain rewards an action after it is done and goes well, not before. So the wish to read follows the reading. Waiting for a child to feel like reading means waiting for a feeling that only comes once they start.
Each turn starts the next one: reading more builds the next skill, and the next skill makes reading easier still. Structure starts each turn. A set class time, a teacher who expects your child, and a short lesson to finish mean the reading begins whether or not anyone feels like it that day. Each start comes a little easier, and that is how a habit forms.
Why now, for your child
Reading isn’t one more thing on the calendar. It’s the skill underneath almost everything else.
Because reading develops in stages, not on a birthday, and the build either keeps moving or it stalls. Once that cycle is turning, it carries itself. When it isn’t turning, waiting doesn’t start it.
Because the weeks are the program. Each one builds a skill and a little more confidence, and a week not started is a week of that your child doesn’t get back. Waiting doesn’t start the cycle. Starting does.
School teachers do a great job. But school teaches reading among a hundred other things. Schools do not have the capacity to give your child a separate hour with a live teacher, the right book, and a few guided minutes a day. This program is built for the school year: sized to sit beside school, doable and sustainable. Working on reading belongs all year.
The receipts
We gave 434 students a reading assessment before their program started, and the same assessment when it ended. Their programs ran four to eight weeks, built the same way as this one: a live class every week and short lessons between classes. Then we compared every student’s finish with their own start.
The nine run from a child’s first steps in reading to the skills strong readers lean on: recognizing letters, capital and lowercase; phonics and phonemic awareness; blending; decoding; sight words; reading aloud fluently; vocabulary; and understanding what they read.
Not some of them. Not most of them. All nine. Across the 434 students, every skill on the list was stronger at the end than at the start. Four to eight weeks was enough to move every one, and six weeks sits right in the middle of that range.
Your child starts with an assessment and finishes with another one. You see where their reading began and where it ended up, measured, not guessed. You will see the change for yourself. Those are your own receipts.
Reading help rarely falls short because of what it teaches. It usually falls short because a child doesn’t do enough of it, consistently. The hardest part of reading help is getting a child to do it. That is the part we can show you evidence on.
The hours show how much reading children completed. And all that reading mattered: about 3 out of 4 students passed their weekly skills check.
Those are hours completed, not hours assigned. It gets done because it is sized to get done.
The unfair advantage of teaching online: every class is recorded. Every teacher is reviewed. Every parent gets the version of teaching we’ve trained for, not whatever the teacher felt like doing that day.
We hire fewer than 3% of applicants. Then we train them in IRD’s specific methodology: how to lead a discussion in a small group. How to draw out a quiet reader. How to redirect a disengaged one. How to use the curriculum we wrote so that it teaches the way it’s supposed to teach.
And then we keep watching. Senior IRD educators review teacher recordings every week, checking that lessons match the curriculum, that students are getting called on, and that no child is being missed. Feedback flows back to the teacher within days. Drift gets corrected fast.
This is something an in-person tutor or a brick-and-mortar learning center cannot do. Their teacher closes the door, and what happens inside is invisible. Online makes the classroom transparent. That’s not a bug of the format. It’s the deepest feature.
“Our programs are warm, encouraging, and very low-pressure. We laugh, celebrate small wins, and mistakes are treated as part of learning — not something to be embarrassed about.”
“Every child comes in at a different place, and the curriculum gives me the tools to adjust in real time. I watch for the moment a student stops guessing and starts actually reading — and then I build on that. That’s when the confidence follows.”
“I have seen immediate confidence and love for reading build in my students, setting them on course for expressive and fluent reading.”
What 13 years has taught us
About 4 children in a small group, never more than 6, against 30 in a typical classroom.
There’s nowhere to hide. There’s no back row. They read aloud more, they’re heard more, and they can’t drift, because there is nowhere to drift to.
No bus. No hallway drama. No twenty other kids whispering. Just your child, their teacher, a few classmates, and the week’s book. Most parents tell us their child is more engaged here than they ever were in a classroom.
Their teacher sees them every minute. Sees the moment they’re lost. Sees the moment it clicks. The format doesn’t hide kids. It surfaces them.
That’s not screen time. That’s a reading class.
Built on a foundation
In our 56 years, we’ve partnered with more than 200 colleges, universities, and school districts to offer our reading programs in their communities.
1,320+ Google reviews · 4.5 stars on Trustpilot from 655 reviews
Real parents. Real kids. Real progress. Most of them came in skeptical.
“This program has been a lifesaver for my child’s confidence. She can read more fluently and has started to comprehend what she’s reading so much better.”
“My son had major breakthroughs. His overall confidence has grown so much. He went from avoiding books to asking to read before bed.”
“We searched for a program that could help our daughter, and nothing worked until this. This program is absolutely amazing. I will recommend this to everyone.”
“She is so excited about learning phonics and being able to recognize more words! The teachers have great energy and make learning fun.”
Every program is designed for your child’s specific grade: age-appropriate books, pacing, and skills focus.
Letter sounds, blending, sight words, and early comprehension, using IRD’s earliest-level original books.
Apply phonics to real stories, read with growing fluency, and understand characters and story structure, with original IRD readers at first-grade level.
Decode longer words, read with expression, and build the comprehension that comes next, with second-grade IRD originals.
The shift from “learning to read” to “reading to learn”: fluency, comprehension, and main ideas across genres, with third-grade IRD readers.
Summarize, analyze, monitor understanding: the analytical skills that separate strong readers from kids who get by, paired with our fourth-grade originals.
Analyze author’s purpose, synthesize across sources, and build the academic vocabulary middle school requires, with our fifth-grade book library.
The Six-Week Reading Habit
Live classes with an expert reading teacher, supervised every week. A small group of about four, never more than six, or one-on-one. Pre-K through 5th grade.
Your child can start this week.
About four children, never more than six, with one expert reading teacher. Your child reads aloud alongside a few classmates and is called on every session.
Every child starts with a free reading assessment, and finishes with another.
View Available Class Times →One teacher, one child. The teacher adapts the same curriculum to exactly where your child is, session by session.
Every child starts with a free reading assessment, and finishes with another.
View Available Class Times →* Every book is an IRD original, included as an ebook in the online lessons.
The guarantees
After 56 years of teaching kids to read, we know what works. Here is what we stand behind, exactly as our Terms of Use state it.
If you are enrolling a student in an IRD school-year program the student has not previously taken with us, your first purchase carries a two-session decision window. The first two sessions exist so you can find out whether the schedule, the teacher, and the workload fit your family. If they do not, we return the tuition.
Tuition is refunded in full if you tell us you want to stop within 48 hours after the end of the second scheduled session, or within 21 days of purchase, whichever comes first. Request the refund by emailing help@readingprograms.org. This is a decision window on a purchase you have already made, and your enrollment continues normally unless you tell us to stop it.
Once a refund is issued, the student is no longer entitled to further sessions or other Services under that purchase.
The Triple Guarantee applies for as long as the student is enrolled in a live-teacher program. All three remedies are satisfied in instruction. They are never redeemable for cash or credit.
If the teacher is not the right fit, we rematch you within 7 days at no charge, plus one additional session with the new teacher at no charge.
If the student was placed wrong, we re-place them within 7 days at no charge.
If the student attends at least 90 percent of scheduled sessions and completes at least 90 percent of assigned practice, over a period of at least four weeks, and does not make measurable reading progress, we provide four further weeks of instruction at no charge.
The Right Outcome guarantee is assessed over a minimum of four weeks and requires both the 90 percent attendance condition and the 90 percent practice condition. The remedy is four further weeks of instruction at no charge. It is not redeemable for cash or credit. To make a claim under any part of the Triple Guarantee, email help@readingprograms.org.
Why “online” feels like it should be cheap
It would be, if this were a typical online program.
$299 buys six weeks with an expert reading teacher who is supervised every week, a new original book every week, and the practice between classes that turns it into a habit. Here’s what makes it possible.
A curriculum we wrote ourselves. Books we wrote ourselves. Online lessons we built ourselves. Teachers we trained ourselves and review every week. None of this is rented from somewhere else. No off-the-shelf phonics app. No licensed reader series. No gig-economy tutor pulled from a marketplace. Every part of what your child experiences was built and refined here, over decades, for one purpose.
Most online education is a markup on what’s already free on the internet. That’s why “online” feels like it should be cheap. Because most of it is cheap. What we do isn’t.
Here’s the honest comparison: what most online options actually are, and what we built instead.
$10–20 a month
$65–130 an hour
$299 for six weeks, small group
Most parents considering a reading program are weighing a few options, some intentional, some not. Here’s what those actually look like.
The hardest one to admit. Even experienced educators struggle to teach their own children. Every correction feels personal. Every session becomes a battle.
Your job is to be the parent, not the teacher.
Most parents end up with a college student, a generalist, or someone without specialized reading training. No consistent curriculum. No system. No guarantee it builds toward anything.
If it doesn’t work, you start over.
Reading is just one of many subjects. Instructors are often generalists, not expert reading teachers. The curriculum is designed to be delivered anywhere, which means consistency, not depth.
At $200+ per week, you’re paying for overhead, not specialized instruction.
The most common choice. “We’ll figure it out later.” “They’ll catch up next year.” But every week you wait is a week of skill and confidence building your child misses, and that is what makes reading easier later.
Waiting is a decision, and it has a cost.
The real question isn’t online versus in-person. It isn’t even price. It’s which option gives your child the best chance of real reading progress, starting this week.
Yes, and it surprises most parents. With about four children in a class, every child reads aloud, speaks, and is called on every session. There's no hiding in the back row. Our teachers are trained specifically in live online engagement, and we've learned how to make fifty minutes feel fast. This isn't screen time. It's active, guided instruction.
Yes. $299 for the small group or $499 for one-on-one, paid once for the six weeks.
Your child can start this week. You pick your class day and time as part of checkout. If you need to miss a session, tell us at least 24 hours ahead and we schedule a makeup session. The recording stays available either way.
The number of children in the session, and the price. A small group is about four children, never more than six, with one teacher. One-on-one is one teacher and one child, and the teacher adapts the same curriculum to exactly where your child is.
Pre-K through grade 5. The teacher works from your child's current reading stage, not their grade, which is what the assessment in week one is for.
Every child starts with an assessment. One-on-one, it is part of the first session. In the small group, it is scheduled separately, usually just before or just after the first session. In week six there is another one, so the six weeks begin and end with a look at where your child's reading is.
A short email to you each week on what your child worked on outside school. You can forward it to your child's teacher if you choose. We send it to you, not to the school.
You pick your class day and time as part of checkout. If none of the available times works for your family, we’ll help find or create another option, or refund your payment in full.
Your child can keep going with our monthly Small-Group Reading Program, $199 a month, cancel anytime. It is the same teaching and the same weekly routine your child built in the six weeks, just kept going. One-on-one families can continue with 1:1 Private Tutoring.
Write to us at help@readingprograms.org. That is also how you tell us about a missed session or anything else about your enrollment.
