Teach your child to read faster

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Do you want your child to learn how to read early? Fast track reading is a method and an app for this purpose.


Why is it important to be able to read early?


Many children start learning to read at school.  It may work well for most. I and many others, however, want our children to cultivate reading habits before that.  We long for the point when the children sit and read books instead of watching movie clips and playing computer games. And we want to get there fast, it's just that.  But we cannot or do not want to push them hard, so we need a good method.


Fast Track Reading is an Android app that I have written for this purpose. It is available on  Google Play Store. There are many apps for learning to read, but I did not find something I thought was good, so I wrote my own. The apps I have looked at almost always teach letters or reading single words. My daughter had learned reading single words well, but going from words to sentences and whole texts was a much bigger problem than I expected. It is this development phase that Fast Track Reading takes care of. Below I describe the development phases of reading as I see them, until the point where Fast Track Reading might be a good idea.

Reading development stages

1. Learning the letters

Here is a wealth of tools, games and more. I think it's important that the child learns both print and handwritten letters. The child must also be able to handle both upper and lower case. Being able to write the letters by hand I think is important at this phase, although it takes some time. Approximately, this phase lasts a year.



2. Forming words

At this stage, you can create small pieces on paper with one word on each patch. I think it's best to do it on a computer with print letters. Of course, start with very short, simple and regular words, e.g. car, dog, cat, can, go, let, sit, hit, pot etc. You point at each letter and pronounce the letter's sound. This is done faster and faster until you finally pronounce the word. Obviously this works best if the words are regular, i.e. every letter has one sound which is the sound it usually has.  So "dog" is good, but "you" is not very good.  Over time, the child can memorize entire words without going through them letter by letter. Step by step, you can introduce longer words and irregular words that are not pronounced as the child first expects. This phase is also approximately one year.


3. Bring letters to sentences

Maybe your child can read some simple texts like comic strips after learning to read a large amount of simple words and some not so simple. But perhaps the necessary concentration or motivation is just not there. It is easy to give up when trying to read a word that is too difficult. There are no reward mechanisms. An app that makes it a bit like a computer game can be the solution.

The Fast Track Reading app

The app works on Android and is available on the Google Play Store:

Fast Track Reading Android App

The idea behind ​​Fast Track Reading

The idea is simple. You enter your own texts in the app that your child can read. One word at a time is highlighted and should be read aloud. Over time, when the child gains speed, several words might be highlighted.  If the word is read correctly, the app says the answer was correct and a funny figure appears on the screen. In case of incorrect answer, several chances to give a correct answers are given. When the text read to the end, you can practice the words that were misread over and over again until no words remain. Then you can read the entire text again. When the entire text is read correctly, a special voice message and a happy fanfare is heard.



This is a first version that can certainly be improved in many ways. I am grateful for suggestions for improvement.