Reading.com Review: An outdated digital reading tutor

Published on Jan 02, 2026

Frequently Asked Questions: This optional section addresses the most common questions that interested parents and educators have when looking for the information on this page.

Should I use Reading.com to teach my child to read?
- No. While Reading.com is far more affordable than Mentava, it is built on an outdated pedagogy that focuses on mechanical decoding rather than the cognitive processes required for fluency. For the top 60% of students, it will "work," but it is inefficient. For the bottom 30-40%, it will fail them or mask their reading difficulties as they appear to succeed at first, only to struggle with fluency and comprehension in later grades.
Is Reading.com better than Mentava?
- In terms of pricing and transparency, yes. It is a more honest product sold at a fair market price. However, pedagogically, they are nearly identical. Both are inspired by Direct Instruction methods from the 1960s and 1970s. Both wrongly believe that decoding is sufficient for developing reading fluency.
Why does it matter that the research backing Reading.com is 50 years old?
- In the last few decades, the Science of Reading has identified orthographic mapping as the key to fluency, the process that stores words for instant retrieval from long-term memory. Older programs like Reading.com assume fluency is a byproduct of age and practice. Modern science shows that fluency is a byproduct of proficiency in phonemic awareness, the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds in words.
Does Reading.com train Phonemic Awareness?
- Their marketing says yes, but they do it incorrectly. They confuse phonics (matching sounds to letters) with phonemic awareness (the auditory processing of sounds). If a child cannot do the exercise with their eyes closed, it isn't training phonemic awareness. By introducing letters and "sliders" immediately, Reading.com introduces the possibility that children will mask their phonemic awareness deficits, leading to invisible reading struggles that appear in later grades.
So what is a proper alternative to Reading.com?
- For the early stages of reading that Reading.com is targeting, children should learn to read with a program that focuses on developing phonemic awareness explicitly, teaches phonics (through simple mapping of letters to sounds, not complicated rules) and provides extra work for those with phonemic awareness deficits. When children are taught in this way, most reading difficulties are prevented or corrected before they snowball into more severe problems.
- There are not many available programs that follow these principles. Heggerty and Equipped for Reading Success are two examples of curricula that do so. However, they are targeted at educators, not parents.
- Pictures Are For Babies is based explicitly on these interventions and packages them into a software tutor that parents can use to teach their children to read effectively without prior experience and minimal training. The Lite version is free with no time limits and covers the majority of the material Reading.com offers at $9.99/month.

Reading.com is a digital reading tutor that provides customers with a structured phonics curriculum consisting of 99 lessons that cover most of the Pre-K to K-2 reading syllabus. Because it is offered as a subscription service through app stores, the pricing is not clear and might be subject to change, but it appears to be around $9.99 per month with discounts for annual subscriptions at the time of writing. The marketing promises a comprehensive curriculum that is inspired by the method of Direct Instruction, which the company claims is backed by research. Most customers appear to be satisfied with this explanation, not knowing that the research in question is over 50 years old and has long been superseded by more sophisticated theories of reading acquisition that do not leave the bottom 30-40% of students behind. More importantly, some students in this bottom group will appear to succeed at first with the outdated phonics instruction used by Reading.com, but will struggle with reading fluency and comprehension in later grades.

Introduction🔗

Before diving into this review, I will clarify a few points.

The target audience of this review consists of parents and interested in a more strict evaluation of Reading.com than those available on app stores and review sites.
My review is primarily focused on its methodology and how its outdated pedagogy makes it ill-suited for the bottom 30-40% of students and inefficient and incomplete for the rest. It is written from the perspective of a designer and builder of literacy software who has acquired a deep understanding of the field in the process. As such, I am able to provide a more informed review than most parents and educators (whose primary job is implementing best practices rather than researching or designing them).
The only reason I can write this review is that I am the maker of a literacy software tutor. To avoid making this review sound like an advertisement for my own product, I will refrain from mentioning it except when strictly necessary.

The positives🔗

Before discussing the issues with its pedagogy, let's discuss the positive aspects of the software. First, Reading.com implements a moderately successful approach to teaching reading that does work for many students. It is based on the method of Direct Instruction, which was created in the 1960s and 1970s. There are two parts to this method, the idea of explicit instruction of the material by a tutor, and the pedagogy used to deliver reading instruction. For the most part, all the issues with Reading.com stem from the latter, while the former is a sound idea that has been shown to be effective in many contexts, not only reading instruction. This idea is also part of the design of Pictures Are For Babies, my own literacy software tutor. Reading.com implements this component reasonably well. It provides a structured curriculum and detailed instructions and scripts for tutors to follow. For students that respond well to an outdated phonics curriculum, this method will be effective. At worst, it will be inefficient and tedious compared to more modern approaches. However, as the section on the negatives will explain, this is because those students have already developed the cognitive skills needed to read fluently or only need a small amount of help to get there.

The app consists of 99 lessons that cover most of the Pre-K to K-2 reading syllabus. They are presented in a game like interface where students follow a path through different worlds, completing lessons as they are guided by a human tutor. This aspect is one of the stronger points of the app. Many other apps leave the student to their own devices, which requires a level of self-regulation that most young children do not possess. By requiring a tutor to guide the student through the lessons, Reading.com ensures that students stay on track and receive the necessary social and emotional support. There are some game-like elements, but for the most part, the app does a good job of keeping the focus on the letters.

The price is another positive aspect of Reading.com. Unlike Mentava, which charges $500/month, Reading.com is priced appropriately for the market and for the quality of its pedagogy. As such, its shortcomings are much easier to forgive. Mentava usually justifies its price by claiming it is a luxury good that automates the job that Reading.com leaves to the parents who are willing to follow the scripts, not knowing that the pedagogy used by both apps shares the same outdated assumptions about reading acquisition. Because Reading.com is sold at a fair price and does not deploy the aggressive marketing tactics that Mentava does to justify its price, the length of this review is much shorter and the tone less harsh.

Once a student completes the lessons, they are equipped to decode most of the words they will encounter in a typical K-2 reading curriculum. Here is where we run into issues. Like Mentava and most of the other reading apps that follow the same outdated phonics approach, Reading.com does not have a working theory of how fluent reading develops beyond the initial decoding stage. This is what makes it ill-suited for the bottom 30-40% of students, inefficient for the rest, and puts some of that bottom group at risk of appearing to succeed at first, only to struggle with reading fluency and comprehension in later grades.

Phonics Is Not Enough🔗

This will become a recurring theme of this series of reviews. I already covered much of this ground in my Mentava review, so I will try to summarize the main points here and focus on how they apply to Reading.com specifically.

I alluded in the introduction that the pedagogy used by Reading.com was good for its time, but has long been superseded by more sophisticated theories of reading acquisition. In particular, the theory of orthographic mapping has answered most of the questions about how fluent reading develops. The emphasis should be put on the word "fluent", because that is the endpoint that any reading program should aim for. Older phonics approaches assume that once students can decode words, they will be able to read fluently. While this is true of the top 60-70% of students, it is not true of the rest. Not only is this bottom group almost half of all students, but individual parents will not know in advance which group their child belongs to. Any reading intervention must be designed to work for both groups because as will be explained soon, the mechanism that drive fluent reading is the same for all students, with mostly variations in the proficiency of that mechanism.

Orthographic mapping is the process by which the sound, spelling, and meaning of a word are stored in long term memory for instant and effortless retrieval. In adult readers, this process has happened tens of thousands of times, allowing them to read fluently across a wide range of texts without using conscious effort in word recognition. The words that have been mapped in this process are known as the sight vocabulary of the reader. It is this ease of reading that allows them to focus their cognitive resources on comprehension and higher-level reading skills. Without a sight vocabulary of this size, a reader might be able to decode most of the words they encounter, but will spend so much effort in doing so that comprehension will suffer. This is one of the main reasons why comprehension remains low in later grades even among students that were taught using a phonics approach.

The mechanism that drives orthographic mapping is phonemic awareness, the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. With this ability in place, a student using Reading.com will quickly map the words that they encounter throughout the lessons. For the students with the very best phonemic awareness, a phonics approach is sometimes not even needed. They can unconsciously infer the letter-sound correspondences on their own as long as they are exposed to enough reading material. These students have never been much of a problem for teachers and reading interventions because they already possess the cognitive skills needed to read fluently.

The problem arises for students that have underdeveloped or weak phonemic awareness skills. Direct Instruction and similarly outdated phonics programs fail these students because they do not train phonemic awareness explicitly and intensively enough to bring it to the level needed for fluent reading. More practice or motivation will not solve the problem if this practice is not targeted at the cause of the problem. As a result, these students will struggle to build a sight vocabulary, leading to poor reading fluency and possibly long-life academic struggles.

Reading.com's marketing material mention the science of reading and phonemic awareness and claim that their product trains these skills. However, like Mentava and most other phonics programs, they misunderstand the very nature of phonemic awareness and how it should be trained. Phonemic awareness is an auditory skill, not a visual one. Reading.com's main feature is to train blending (a core phonemic awareness skill) by using a bar below each word that the student drags from left to right while sounding out the individual sounds of the word. There are some issues with this approach:

First, that is not a phonemic awareness task, it's a phonics task. If you are wondering what's the difference, ask yourself if the exercise in question could be performed with the eyes closed. If the answer is no, then it's not a phonemic awareness task but a phonics task. In Reading.com's case, the bar is in the screen and the letters are shown from the beginning. By introducing visual elements too early, they allow for the possibility of students masking their phonemic awareness deficits by relying on their letter-sound knowledge to complete the task. A much more detailed explanation of this issue is available in my Mentava review.
I saw videos of the students dragging the bar back and forth multiple times and still being allowed to proceed. Other videos showed that students can complete lessons if they decode the word correctly but do so with great effort. In such cases, the app is allowing students to proceed without ensuring that the words are being orthographically mapped, wrongly thinking that fluency will develop on its own later.
There is no review mechanism to ensure repeated exposure to the words that have been taught. Repeated exposure is essential for orthographic mapping to occur. Instead, the app does what most phonics programs do, which is to include seen material in later lessons. This is not a terrible choice, but it is far from optimal. As a point of comparison, Pictures Are For Babies is built on top of a deliberate practice engine that optimally schedules reviews of previously taught material based on each student's performance history.
More importantly for the students in the bottom group, Reading.com does not include phonemic awareness training beyond the badly implemented blending described above. Several reading interventions that provide intense training of phonemic awareness skills like deletion (e.g , "say 'cat' without the /k/ sound"), substitution (e.g., "change the /k/ sound in 'cat' to /b/"), and reversal (e.g., "say 'tap' backwards") can bring phonemic awareness to the level needed for grade-level reading. Those interventions have shown life-changing results for children with reading difficulties, and have shown that over 90% of children can learn to read at grade level with correct instruction focused on the correct skills.

There is an additional issue that relates to the depth of the curriculum. By stopping at the K-2 level, Reading.com leaves the rest of the development of the sight vocabulary of its students to chance. Remember that fluent readers have a sight vocabulary of tens of thousands of words. Again, they are not alone in this shortcoming. As a point of comparison, the word courses in Pictures Are For Babies contain over 1,100 lessons that teach over 18,000 unique words from Pre-K to college level. This amount of content is necessary to ensure that students can read fluently across a wide range of texts and their performance does not fall off a cliff once they reach later grades.

Conclusion🔗

Reading.com is a reasonably priced reading tutor that implements an outdated phonics approach suitable for the top 60-70% of students. For these students, it will be effective at teaching them to decode most of the words they will encounter in a typical K-2 reading curriculum, if somewhat inefficient and tedious compared to more modern approaches. However, for the bottom 30-40% of students, Reading.com will likely fail to deliver the promised results. Given the size of the bottom group and the fact that parents will not know in advance which group their child belongs to, this is a serious shortcoming that the app shares with most other phonics programs. As was explained in the overview of the Reading Wars, the failure of traditional phonics programs to address the needs of this bottom group is the main reason why educators looked for alternatives in the first place. Until Reading.com and similar apps update their pedagogy to align with the current consensus of the field, they will continue to leave behind a group of students that only needs correct and targeted instruction to go on to catch up with their peers and become fluent readers.