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    Curriculum

    Frequently Asked Questions
    • Which software to learn reading and writing has the most extensive curriculum?
      • The most extensive curriculum should cover all aspects of literacy, from learning individual letters to reading and writing at an advanced level. Most programs stop at the end of second or third grade. In contrast, Pictures Are For Babies provides an integrated path through reading comprehension and writing at the graduate and professional school level.
    • Does Pictures Are For Babies teach both reading and writing?
      • Yes. Its integrated curriculum progresses from recognizing and writing symbols to reading and spelling words and sentences, comprehending increasingly difficult texts, and writing at the sentence, paragraph, and multi-paragraph levels.
    • How advanced is the reading comprehension curriculum?
      • The fifteen reading comprehension levels progress from early material such as nursery rhymes through texts read in graduate programs and professional schools. Levels 1-12 roughly cover US grades 1-12, levels 13-14 cover undergraduate material, and level 15 covers graduate and professional school material.
    • What kinds of texts are included in the reading comprehension curriculum?
      • The passages come from texts across a wide variety of genres, types, and subjects. Footnotes introduce the background knowledge needed for comprehension, while default prompts help tutors assess whether students understood what they read.
    • How does Pictures Are For Babies teach writing?
      • Every reading comprehension course is followed by a writing course based on its material. The lessons show how excellent writers solve repeatable tasks involving sentences, paragraphs, and multi-paragraph texts. Tutors can then use completed lessons as the basis for open-ended writing practice and compare the student's work to the model answer.
    • Which parts of the curriculum are currently complete?
      • The symbol, word, and sentence tracks are complete. The early reading comprehension and writing levels are also available, with roughly one new level added each month.
    • Are new curriculum levels included for existing customers?
      • Yes. All new levels are made available to existing customers at no additional cost.

    Pictures Are For Babies is the first and last literacy program your child will ever need.

    For students, it provides a complete path from learning the alphabet and its sounds to reading and writing at the level required in graduate and professional schools. Pictures Are For Babies frees parents and educators from the need to piece together a complete literacy education from disparate resources with conflicting sequencing and pedagogy. Instead, they can rest easy knowing a single program teaches every skill needed along the way in a carefully designed sequence.

    When combined with a powerful practice engine that ensures personalized and optimized scheduling and a pedagogy based on the most rigorous research, the curriculum transforms into an adaptive and responsive system that covers the needs of all students. It can adapt both to students with phonological deficits, the most common cause of reading difficulties, and to the highest-performing students.

    The current version includes the fully completed symbol, word, and sentence tracks, which together cover reading and spelling from the alphabet to college-level sentences. The early levels of the reading comprehension and writing tracks are complete and new levels are being added roughly one per month and offered to all existing customers at no extra cost.

    Below is a visual representation of the program's structure. An arrow from course A to course B means that course A must be completed before course B can be started. Individual lessons are omitted to keep the graph to a reasonable size. You can also open the graph directly to have a better look. The following sections go into the details of each track.

    Course Graph

    Symbols🔗

    The first track of the curriculum introduces the most common symbols 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 punctuation marks are commonly used.

    Words🔗

    The next track 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 track. Orthographic mapping is the process by which previously unfamiliar words become instantly recognizable. Without ensuring this level of fluency, students struggle to read real materials and spend precious cognitive resources on decoding tasks. For a much more detailed explanation of these concepts, please refer to the pedagogy document.

    Each lesson in this track 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 track contains twenty-five levels, 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 17,500 unique words.

    Sentences🔗

    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.

    Reading Comprehension🔗

    After a sufficient number of spelling patterns have been introduced, the next track introduces passages from texts in increasing levels of difficulty. The texts are varied across genres, types, and subjects. Texts are annotated with footnotes to carefully introduce background knowledge and default prompts help the tutor assess whether the student comprehended the passages. The reading comprehension track contains fifteen levels, organized as follows:

    • Levels 1-12 roughly cover US grades 1 to 12, with very early material like nursery rhymes included in the first level.
    • Level 13 covers the material taught during the first two years of an undergraduate degree.
    • Level 14 covers the material taught during the last two years of an undergraduate degree.
    • Level 15 covers the material taught in master's and doctoral programs and in professional schools like business, law, and medical schools.

    Writing🔗

    The final track of the curriculum introduces writing. A writing course follows every reading comprehension course and uses its material as the basis for its exercises. Because the engine that powers Pictures Are For Babies requires repeatable exercises with clearly defined answers, the lessons do not ask students to perform open-ended writing tasks. Rather, they show students how excellent writers solve tasks at the sentence, paragraph, and multi-paragraph level. Some of these tasks include using conjunctions and transitions to combine ideas, expanding sentences to include additional information, performing revision at the sentence and paragraph levels, and creating paragraph outlines.

    In order to allow students to practice writing production, tutors 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 writing production. 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.