Curriculum

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.

Which software to learn reading and writing has the most extensive curriculum?
- Pictures Are For Babies has the most extensive curriculum of any program teaching reading and writing. Many competing programs stop at the end of second or third grade, while Pictures Are For Babies covers all aspects of literacy from learning individual letters to reading and writing at the college level and beyond.
What is the curriculum of Pictures Are For Babies?
- The curriculum of Pictures Are For Babies is divided into several tracks of increasing complexity, each introducing new aspects of literacy and building on existing foundations. The initial version includes the symbol, word, and sentence tracks, with upcoming texts and writing tracks to be added in the future.
How extensive is the curriculum of Pictures Are For Babies?
- Even at its initial stage, the symbol, word, and sentence tracks already include over 1,200 lessons covering more than 18,000 unique words and thousands of sentences. When complete, Pictures Are For Babies will provide a complete path to mastery of all aspects of literacy from learning individual letters to reading and writing at the college level and beyond.
Will future content updates of Pictures Are For Babies be available to existing users?
- Yes, all future content updates will be made available to existing users at no additional cost.

The curriculum of Pictures Are For Babies is divided along several tracks of increasing complexity, each introducing new aspects of literacy and building on existing foundations. The initial version introduced the symbol, word, and sentence tracks, which together cover reading and spelling at the word and sentence level all the way to sentences one would find in college-level texts. The upcoming texts and writing tracks will extend the curriculum to cover reading comprehension of a large variety of texts and explicit writing instruction at the sentence and paragraph level.

Even at this early stage, the curriculum is already more vast than any competing program, many of which stop at the end of second or third grade. When complete, Pictures Are For Babies will be the first literacy program to provide a complete path to mastery of all aspects of literacy from learning individual letters to reading and writing at the college level and beyond. All future content updates will be made available to existing users at no additional cost.

Symbols: Introducing letter-sound knowledge and punctuation🔗

The first stage of the curriculum introduces every symbol used in English, starting with the alphabet, followed by numbers, and punctuation marks. Students are first asked to identify them and then asked to write them. When warranted, additional notes and examples are provided to clarify how the symbols are commonly used.

Words: Systematic phonics and orthographic mapping🔗

The next stage introduces words, starting from simple words of the form consonant-vowel-consonant and continuing all the way to complex words used in undergraduate and graduate material.

While the beginning of the curriculum follows a usual phonics structure, the program differs from most phonics offerings in ways that align better with fundamental principles of literacy acquisition. Spelling patterns are used to organize the lessons, but they are not taught explicitly as a complicated set of rules. Metalinguistic concepts like "short vs long vowels" are completely avoided because they confuse students and fluent readers do not use them to read.

Instead, the concept of orthographic mapping is central to this stage. Orthographic mapping is the process by which previously unfamiliar words become instantly recognizable. Without ensuring this level of automaticity, students struggle to read fluently and spend precious cognitive resources on decoding tasks. For a much more detailed explanation of these concepts, please refer to the pedagogy document and the word courses section of the manual.

Each lesson in this stage comes in pairs: a reading lesson tests the student's ability to instantly read them and a dictation lesson tests their ability to quickly and accurately spell them.

The words stage contains twenty-five levels of courses, roughly organized as follows:

Levels 1-8: One-syllable words
Levels 9-11: Two and three-syllable words
Levels 12-17: Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and Greek morphology
Level 18: Foreign loanwords, archaic and British English
Level 19-25: Semantic categories organized by subject-matter. Starting from common categories like animals and food, the lessons progress to more specialized categories like economics, politics, astronomy, and medicine.

Altogether, the word courses contain over 1,100 lessons that cover over 18,000 unique words.

Sentences: Reading and spelling in connected text🔗

After each word course follows a course that asks the student to read and write sentences that include the words introduced in the corresponding word course. For example, after a course that introduced words like "mom", "their", "bought", and "bottle", the corresponding sentence course will include sentences like "Their mom brought dinner.", "I bought three bottles.", etc. As the curriculum progresses, the sentences also increase in syntactic complexity to gently introduce students to more complex structures in preparation for reading real texts.

Texts: Reading comprehension of a wide variety of texts of increasing complexity🔗

After a sufficient number of spelling patterns have been introduced, the next stage introduces texts of various types in ordering level of difficulty. The texts are varied across types (news, articles, fiction, poetry, essays), subjects (history, economics, philosophy), regions, eras, and more. Texts are annotated to carefully introduce background knowledge needed for comprehension. By the end of the levels, students will be reading college-level material and beyond.

Writing: Explicit writing instruction at the sentence and paragraph level🔗

The final stage of the curriculum introduces writing. After each level of text courses, a writing course is interleaved. Because the engine that powers Pictures Are For Babies requires repeatable exercises with clearly defined answers, the lessons do not ask students to perform writing tasks, but rather show students how excellent writers solve tasks at the sentence and paragraph level. Whenever possible, the tasks are based on the texts read in the previous stage.

In order to allow students to practice writing production, tutors will have the ability to instruct the engine to only recommend writing lessons. Once they find a lesson that the student has completed previously with a good score, they can use it as a basis for a writing production task and compare the student's output to the model answer.

Tasks Outside the Program's Scope🔗

Two important literacy tasks are outside the scope of the program due to their non-reproducible nature: reading entire texts and producing original writing. However, the rest of the curriculum supports these tasks. Students are encouraged to pick from the texts included in the program and read them in their entirety. Tutors can also go through the writing tasks and use them as a basis for writing production tasks.

Course Graph🔗

Below is a visual representation of the program's structure. The arrows indicate the dependent relationships between courses. That is, an arrow from course A to course B means that course A must be completed before course B can be started. Only courses are included because the graph is too large otherwise. To have a better look, right-click on the image and select "Open Image in New Tab".

It includes only the symbols, words, and sentence tracks, as the rest of the courses are still under construction.