What you get every week

Silent-e with long a and long i (the magic e in cake, time, bike) is now automatic, Maya is reading these without sounding them out. Steps 4.1 and 4.2 each met the mastery bar, 90% accuracy across the last two sessions taken together, before the program moved her on. She is now on step 4.3, silent-e with long o (hope, home).

The two words she stumbled on, those and broke, come back in the next session's warm-up, then return on a widening schedule until they stay clean. You do not have to remember a thing; the program tracks every miss.

• those
• broke

Before it is fair to time a child reading whole sentences (end of Level 4), the weekly one-minute read measures the building blocks the way reading specialists do, and charts each one only against Maya's own earlier checks. This week's check was word reading: 38 words read per minute, up from 31 on the comparable check two weeks earlier. Her spelling check stands at 61 correct letter sequences in two minutes, up from 52. Her first sound-out (made-up word) check recorded 27 words per minute; a first check is a starting value, and the next one will show the direction.

For you (never shown to Maya): timed passage reading does not begin until Level 5, so there is no whole-sentence speed score yet. Until then, each weekly measure is charted only against Maya's own earlier checks, never against other children. Accuracy comes first: the bar is 95% of words read correctly before fluency growth counts, and fluency exists to serve comprehension.

Every number here has an exact written definition: which one-minute measure runs on which night, how each score is computed, what counts as an error, and who does the marking. The full protocol is public at how we measure.

Maya had a strong, consistent week, five sessions, and her silent-e decoding crossed over into automatic. Nothing here needs fixing; the single best thing you can do is keep the daily rhythm going. The two tricky words are handled. This is what steady progress looks like: small, real, and built on showing up. Keep going, you are doing the hard part.

This sample shows the same measures, definitions and mastery bar your child's note uses. Your child's note fills itself in from your child’s real sessions.

Eli is now breaking longer words into chunks instead of guessing. The syllable-splitting steps he mastered earlier this month (steps 9.6 and 9.7) are showing up in his stories: unhappy, return, and refill went from stumbles to clean reads. This is the skill that decides whether textbooks feel possible.

We worked the prefixes un- and re- (step 10.1, mastered this week) and began pre-, dis-, and mis- (step 10.2). Eli can now use the parts of a word to read it and spell it, so one pattern unlocks dozens of words at once.

Spelling is catching up to reading. Prefix spellings (unlock, redo) are solid in dictation now. The two that slipped, disagree and misplace, come back in the next session's warm-up automatically.

• disagree
• misplace

This week's one-minute read on the program's level passage: 129 words correct per minute, up from 118 across three timed checks, at 97% accuracy. Trending up, exactly what the built-in reread is for. This is progress on leveled connected text he has practiced, not a cold grade-level score.

For you (never shown to Eli): what we measure is Eli's decoding accuracy on the skills he is working, his reading rate, and his own trend over time. He clears the 95% accuracy bar and the speed gain counts as growth on leveled connected text. We chart Eli against his own trend first. This weekly read is never compared with national norms. From the end of Level 8, a separate grade-level check-up on brand-new stories shows how his reading speed compares with the published school norms (a teen is compared with the top of those tables).

Eli read a full longer passage without asking to stop, and stayed accurate to the end. Reading is starting to cost him less, which is exactly the goal at this level.

Eli had a strong week, and the gains are in the things that matter most for an older reader: more fluent reading, cleaner long words, and spelling that is finally following along. Nothing here needs a heavy hand from you. Keep the daily rhythm and let the program keep folding back what slips. He is doing real work, and it is showing.

Eli's note carries the same sections as Maya's, with the timed passage check added because he reads connected text (Level 5 and up). Same warm plain English, same one page, same automatic generation from the child's real sessions.