This FAQ has been split into multiple sections for easier navigation. Links to each section are included below:
The absence of pictures is a careful pedagogical and philosophical choice. The choice is pedagogical because the mechanisms by which reading is acquired do not rely on visual processing. Most reading difficulties stem from deficits in phonological processing and the exercises that correct them can be performed with eyes closed.
The philosophical aspect is that Pictures Are For Babies respects learners. It does not rely on gamification or motivation hacks to keep students engaged. Instead, it fosters the conditions under which deliberate practice thrives. Literacy is treated as a skill with intrinsic value that is worth focused and sustained effort.
To read more about the reasons for this decision, please read the no pictures section.
Pictures Are For Babies does not hide the fact that learning to read and write to the highest level is hard work. However, it believes in the intrinsic value of literacy and emphasizes it from the very beginning. Rather than being a chore or a task to be completed quickly to move on to something else, reading and writing are presented as valuable skills that students should find intrinsically rewarding.
There are two main strategies to keep students engaged, one during practice and one outside it. By using Trane, the deliberate practice engine that powers Pictures Are For Babies, students practice at the edge of their abilities using proven optimal learning strategies. The result is flow, a state of deep engagement and intrinsic enjoyment in the performance of the task.
Even when flow is achieved, students may sometimes feel tired or bored. To address this, Pictures Are For Babies gives tutors and students the freedom to take a reading break whenever needed. In this activity, the tutor read to the student using a book the student enjoys and finds engaging. This activity subtly reinforces the intrinsic value of reading and writing while also developing the student's oral language, vocabulary, and background knowledge, all essential for reading comprehension.
Neither approach is the right answer. The "Whole Word" approach to reading instruction has been thoroughly discredited by decades of scientific research. Phonics, while a necessary component of correct reading instruction, is not sufficient by itself to develop fluent, automatic reading.
Skilled reading depends on a process called orthographic mapping, through which students permanently store written words in long-term memory by connecting their pronunciation, spelling, and meaning. Fluent readers store tens of thousands of words through this process, which allows them to spend their cognitive resources on comprehension instead of decoding. Programs that focus only on phonics and decoding often stop short of developing orthographic mapping. As a result, students may decode words accurately but can struggle to become fluent readers.
Pictures Are For Babies teaches word-level reading and spelling by aligning with the principles followed by the most successful reading interventions. Those interventions have shown that 90 to 95 percent of children can learn to read at grade level with proper instruction focused on the correct foundational skills that support orthographic mapping of tens of thousands of words. The Pedagogy and Word Courses sections provide full explanations on the choices made by Pictures Are For Babies and the science behind them.
No other program offers a truly comprehensive path to full literacy mastery. Some programs cover early reading skills. Others provide isolated writing instruction. But none combine a complete curriculum, a deliberate practice engine, and full alignment with the science of reading, writing, expert performance, and optimal learning.
Even if a comparable curriculum existed, without a sophisticated practice engine like the one powering Pictures Are For Babies, it would fall on teachers and tutors to schedule and manage student progress manually. Without such a tool, the effectiveness and scalability of any such program would be severely limited.
The pedagogy section contains a detailed comparison of Pictures Are For Babies with existing programs. While some get parts right, none match its depth, breadth, and integration of the full body of research.
No. Pictures Are For Babies does not use large language models or any other system that generates content statistically. Those approaches are poorly suited for the specific needs of literacy instruction and using them would mean to discard a large body of proven research on the most effective methods for reading and writing instruction and on how to deliver them with the strategies used by experts to reach the top of their fields.
Instead, the program is powered by a deliberate practice engine (Trane) and a comprehensive curriculum that integrates the latest research on literacy instruction. Together, they deliver the most effective methods for reading and writing instruction with fidelity, leaving nothing to chance. Under a classical definition of artificial intelligence, Pictures Are For Babies can be considered an expert system, a computer program designed to simulate the decision-making ability of an expert. In this case, the expert is a trained literacy tutor who is fluent with the latest research on neuroscience, expert performance, optimal learning, and the science of reading and writing.
Because the term artificial intelligence has become synonymous with large language models and similar systems that cannot deliver the same level of instruction, none of the promotional material or documentation refers to Pictures Are For Babies as an AI system.
The main prerequisite for starting reading and writing instruction is that the student has developed sufficient oral language skills and basic fine motor skills to write letters and simple words. Because children develop at different rates, there is no exact age for beginning Pictures Are For Babies.
Instead of suggesting an age, the program uses the reading break as a tool to smoothly transition students into reading and writing instruction. Reading breaks without instruction can be used to develop oral language and vocabulary until the student is ready to start learning to read and write. When the tutor feels the student is ready, they can introduce Pictures Are For Babies to gauge readiness for formal instruction. The Lite version of Pictures Are For Babies is offered for free with no time limits to allow tutors to determine the right time without financial pressure.
Deliberate practice is effortful and focused, so there is a natural limit to how long a student can practice in a single session. Students should practice for at least 15 minutes and no more than 60 minutes per session. These times include the time taken during reading breaks.
The frequency of practice is more important than the duration because the engine that schedules lessons works better with more frequent practice. The recommended frequency is three to five sessions per week. Depending on the student, they might be able to break practice into multiple chunks per day, although the total amount should not exceed 60 minutes per day, unless the student is particularly motivated and able to practice for longer periods without losing focus. However, this should not become an expectation for every student and every day.
Finishing the completed version of Pictures Are For Babies means that the student has mastered reading and writing at the college level and beyond. This is a long-term goal that takes twelve years or more in a traditional setting and a large part of the population never reaches this level. Because Pictures Are For Babies is also new, there are currently no students who have completed it.
The version at launch includes the full curriculum for the symbol, word, and sentence tracks, which will take less time to complete. Regular updates will add the text and writing tracks. The expectation is that the median student takes around 5 years with regular practice to finish the full program. Assuming a start age between 4 and 6 years old, this means finishing around ages 9 to 11, which would represent an unprecedented effect size for a literacy intervention. The techniques and pedagogy used in Pictures Are For Babies have been shown to produce large effect sizes by themselves. Pictures Are For Babies combines them into a single coherent program, which should produce better results than any of them alone, so while the estimate is optimistic, it is not unrealistic.
In the meantime, rest assured that the program is specifically designed to keep students practicing at the edge of their abilities while also providing them with optimal review of past lessons and science-based interventions if they struggle. This section will be updated as more data becomes available.
For now, the recommended approach is to start from the beginning of the program. Unlike most other programs, Pictures Are For Babies uses automatic and fluent reading and writing as the criterion for mastery. Other programs often allow students to move through lessons if they can decode or write slowly. This is pedagogically unsound because it allows reading difficulties to persist undetected.
If after going through a lesson, the student finds it too easy, the tutor has the ability to mark lessons and even entire courses as mastered. Once marked as such, these lessons and courses will not appear again, and the student will be able to move on to the next lessons.
Future versions of Pictures Are For Babies will include a diagnostic tool that will allow tutors to assess the student's reading and writing skills and place them in the appropriate lessons and courses.
Yes. Pictures Are For Babies is based on a large and replicated body of scientific research that has proven the most common cause of reading difficulties is a deficit in a student's ability to break words into their individual sounds and to manipulate them, not in visual processing, motivation, memory, or general intelligence. The interventions that Pictures Are For Babies uses to remediate these deficits have been shown to make 90 to 95 percent of all students read at grade level.
The small percentage of students who do not respond to these interventions often have other severe conditions that require specialized help. However, even in these cases, Pictures Are For Babies can help specialists by providing them with a structured curriculum and a deliberate practice engine to implement their interventions with minimal overhead.
Yes. Pictures Are For Babies is designed to take students from complete illiteracy to full mastery of reading and writing at the college level and beyond, a depth that no other individual program offers. The same pedagogy that helps students with reading difficulties makes advanced students excel, as it ensures the core skills used to develop fluent reading and writing are developed to the advanced level.
The use of Trane, the deliberate practice engine that powers Pictures Are For Babies, allows students to practice at the edge of their abilities, using the same principles used by elite performers to reach the highest levels in their fields. Although the engine is meant to help all students, advanced students will benefit the most as they will be able to practice with fewer reviews of past lessons and at a faster pace.
However, Pictures Are For Babies does not place special emphasis on speed or acceleration. Making that the goal often leads to superficial learning that collapses when real demands are placed on the student. Instead, Pictures Are For Babies focuses on mastery, fluency, and optimally exposing students to quality and representative lessons over long periods. Only when these conditions are met can true acceleration occur.
Yes. Pictures Are For Babies is designed as a full literacy program, but school instruction does not interfere with it, even if the school uses a suboptimal approach. The reason is that Pictures Are For Babies focuses on the core skills that create fluent reading and writing and contains interventions that can help students with reading difficulties or who received incorrect instruction.
There is a vast and well-documented gap between the scientific consensus on how reading and writing develop and the instruction most schools deliver. As long as the tutor sticks to the instructions in the manual, Pictures Are For Babies will provide the student with the most effective instruction available.
No. Pictures Are For Babies is not a traditional phonics program that requires the tutor to learn an elaborate set of rules, exceptions to those rules, and further exceptions to the exceptions. These programs also require the tutor to learn metalinguistic terms like "digraphs", "magic e", "vowel teams", or others. Fluent readers, however, do not think about these terms when reading or writing and often do not even know them, which proves they are not necessary for developing fluent reading and writing.
Instead, Pictures Are For Babies teaches phonics by having the tutor break words into their individual sounds, blend those sounds together, and map them to the letters that represent those sounds. The same procedure is used to teach all the words in the program. Pictures Are For Babies repeatedly exposes students to the same lessons until they master them, which takes care of ensuring the student learns all those words without memorizing rules or exceptions. The design of the curriculum ensures that all the patterns that other programs codify as complex sets of rules are learned naturally and progressively through practicing over more than a thousand lessons.
For students who struggle developing fluent reading, Pictures Are For Babies provides a set of interventions that require that the tutor delete, substitute, and reverse the sounds of words. Because research has shown that fluent readers can perform these operations easily, the only requirements for a tutor are to be a fluent reader and writer themselves, and to be willing to guide the student through the process of acquiring the same skills.
There is no requirement for the tutor to be a native English speaker. However, they should be fluent in the language. This means they are able to make all the sounds of the language and pronounce all words correctly. The second requirement does not mean that the tutor should be able to pronounce all words without looking them up (no native speakers can do that either), but that upon looking them up, they can pronounce them correctly and break them into their individual sounds.
This is different from being a native speaker or having no accent, although many people who have strong accents do so because they cannot correctly pronounce some sounds of English. If you are unsure, it may be best to get a native speaker to take the role of tutor or to receive training on how to pronounce all the sounds of the language.
Yes. As long as they are a fluent reader and writer who can follow the instruction manual, they can fill the role. In the case of siblings and peers, they do not need to be fluent to the level of a high-school or college graduate, but they should be fluent at a level higher than the student they are tutoring.
This level of flexibility differentiates Pictures Are For Babies from other programs, even those that share the same pedagogy. Most of those programs require specialized training to deliver the same level of instruction.
Yes. While Pictures Are For Babies is designed to work mostly offline, it requires an internet connection to activate and validate the license. However, there is a grace period of 3 days or 5 program launches (whichever comes first) during which the program can be used without an internet connection if a license was previously activated. The grace period should be enough to allow tutors to use the program during intermittent internet outages.
There are two options for accessing the full version of Pictures Are For Babies. A one-time payment of $1000 grants you a lifetime license and all future updates to the software and course contents. A $20/month subscription provides full access to all content and updates for the duration of the subscription.
A lite version of Pictures Are For Babies is available for an optional donation with no time limits. The lite version includes all the symbol courses and the first few levels of the words and sentence courses. It is meant to allow prospective users to try the program without financial risk and to help tutors determine if the student is ready for formal reading and writing instruction.
The Lite version of Pictures Are For Babies is very powerful despite its limited scope for a few reasons. First, it delivers the same pedagogy and practice engine as the full version, enabling students to practice with the same principles of deliberate practice. More importantly, the Lite version can be used as a complete tool for early instruction and remediation of reading difficulties because it triggers the same interventions as the full version. Most free and paid programs cannot make this claim because they are not designed with orthographic mapping in mind, the process by which fluent readers store words in long-term memory for effortless retrieval. Most stop at decoding, which is not sufficient and can allow reading difficulties to persist undetected.
The Lite version can be offered for free because Pictures Are For Babies operates under a very different definition of what it means to be a reader and writer. Most free and paid programs focus on decoding and early instruction, but Pictures Are For Babies has the primary goal of developing mastery of reading and writing at the college level and beyond. While the value of the Lite version is high compared to most other free and paid programs, it is a small fraction of the value of the full version.
Currently, only English is planned. However, the approach should work for every language. Depending on how well the English version does, other languages might be added. Proving that Pictures Are For Babies can develop mastery of literacy in more complex languages like Chinese would be a landmark achievement for the program.
The initial release will target desktop platforms (Windows and Mac). A tutor is responsible for operating the software, so it's not necessary or advisable for the software to be installed in the student's tablet or personal computer. Depending on demand, mobile versions might be added. However, due to increased costs associated with distributing software in the Apple and Google ecosystems, the cost might be higher.
A Linux version was originally planned, but issues in packaging a final binary have delayed its release. Those issues are caused by the tool I am using to build and package the user interface. Once those are resolved, a Linux version will be released.
Contact support. For license issues, please include your license information. To request a refund, please include your subscription or invoice. The refund policy is in the Terms and Conditions.
If you have issues with payment processing, please contact the payment provider, LemonSqueezy, first. If that does not resolve your issue, contact our support team at the above email with your subscription or invoice information, and we will try to help.
To report a bug, please include steps to reproduce it. You might be asked to share the folder where the program stores its data. All the stored data is anonymized and does not include any personal information, so it is safe to share.
To request a feature, please include a detailed description of the feature and how it would improve the program. We reserve the right to decline feature requests that do not align with our long-term vision.
Pictures Are For Babies is an entirely bootstrapped project with neither investors, external funding, nor employees. While those choices made its development slower, they also allowed for complete creative control over the project without external pressures to compromise on its core values. Without investors, a small customer base is enough to guarantee the future of the project.
Everything about its design and business model is meant to allow Pictures Are For Babies to be profitable from the start. Thanks to those choices, Pictures Are For Babies can be offered for a much smaller amount than either hiring a reading specialist or some of the alternative programs on the market. These options range from $30/hour (more than the monthly subscription fee) to several hundred dollars per month. Higher prices do not guarantee better results. In fact, most existing programs, expensive or not, fail to fully integrate evidence-based practices and principles of effective reading instruction.
That's understandable. However, the same choices made to bootstrap the project also mean it is more resilient to a single point of failure. It does not rely on external funding for its continued development, so there is no risk of bankruptcy. If the project fails to gain much initial traction, rest assured that access to the program will not be abruptly cut off. At worst, I will be forced to find regular employment and work on the project in my spare time.
In the event that I am unable to continue its development due to unforeseen circumstances, your copy of the program will continue to work indefinitely as long as the license provider (in this case, LemonSqueezy) continues to honor existing licenses. While that would mean no further content updates, the existing material already covers more than any competing program.