The Lite version of Pictures Are For Babies contains the first courses of the program, which cover learning the alphabet, common symbols, and basic words and sentences. It includes around 250 lessons and provides the same functionality as the full version. Lite licenses never expire and are offered for a suggested donation of $50, but the user can set their own price, including no payment at all.
The Lite version allows prospective users to try out Pictures Are For Babies without any financial commitment. Parents of small children can use a Lite license to determine if their child is ready for explicit reading and writing instruction. If the child is not ready, parents can wait until the child is older before trying again. More instructions for this use case are available in the reading break section of the manual.
The primary use of the Lite version, however, is to serve as a complete solution for early detection and remediation of reading difficulties. Thanks to its pedagogy, designed from the ground up on the principles of orthographic mapping, the Lite version contains all that a parent, educator, or reading specialist needs to detect and remediate reading difficulties.
Specifically, Pictures Are For Babies contains precise instructions on how to conduct reading interventions that target deficits in phonemic awareness, the ability to break words into individual sounds and efficiently manipulate them. This ability has been proven to be the most common cause of reading difficulties, and the exercises that Pictures Are For Babies contains are proven to be effective in developing it. With even a few dozen hours of proper instruction, students who previously struggled for years managed to read at grade level. These interventions have also been proven to be effective in older children and adults.
The rest of the manual contains detailed instructions on how to conduct the lessons and interventions. This section contains a guide on how to use the Lite version of Pictures Are For Babies in a Pre-K to K-2 classroom. The guide assumes that the tutor role is played by a teacher, teaching assistant, or reading specialist. The instructions for using the Lite version in a classroom are the same for the most part as using it at home or with individual students. The differences are outlined below:
The Lite version of Pictures Are For Babies contains most of what is covered in Pre-K to K-2 classrooms. Tutors and educators that wish to go beyond are free to use the manual as a guide to create their own lessons and run the appropriate interventions. Keep in mind, however, that manually creating lessons while ensuring the same level of fidelity as Pictures Are For Babies is a complex and labor-intensive task.
The full version of Pictures Are For Babies contains the complete curriculum for words and sentences, covering twenty-five levels of difficulty and over 18,000 unique words. This level of content goes far beyond what is covered in most other literacy programs. It includes nearly all vowel and consonant patterns seen in one-syllable words, many common multi-syllable words, Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and Greek morphology, and a wide variety of words common in common situations, and academic subjects. Here is a small sample of sentences from the late levels:
Binary logic gates form the foundation of most computer systems, with modern computers having billions of them.
Franz Kafka's works explore themes of alienation, unjust laws, and complex bureaucracies.
Oxygen diffused through the circulatory system rapidly after the patient's respiratory rate increased.
Napoleon Bonaparte's Egyptian campaign led to the deciphering of hieroglyphics.
In Russia, the quick and careless transfer of common infrastructure to the private sector led to a large economic crisis.
The full version will also add texts and writing courses that will allow students to master reading and writing to a college level and beyond. All further content updates to Pictures Are For Babies are included to all users of the full version at no additional cost.
Beyond its use in offering customers a free trial of the program, the Lite version of Pictures Are For Babies is a complete solution for early detection and remediation of reading difficulties, which outclasses most free and paid programs for this purpose. A full explanation of the program's advantages is available in the pedagogy section of the manual. This commentary will focus on orthographic mapping, the role of phonemic awareness in reading difficulties, and how Pictures Are For Babies, unlike most other programs, focuses on developing phonemic awareness to the advanced level.
Orthographic mapping is the process by which words are stored in long-term memory for automatic retrieval. When words are not orthographically mapped, the reader has to rely on inefficient processes like sounding out words, guessing, or using context clues to read them. With most of their cognitive resources focused on effortfully reading individual words, the reader cannot focus on comprehension and other higher-level tasks.
Phonemic awareness is the ability to break words into individual sounds and efficiently manipulate them. This ability is crucial for orthographic mapping because it allows the reader to connect the sounds in words to their corresponding letters or letter combinations and to efficiently store tens of thousands of words in long-term memory. Because of this, deficits in phonemic awareness are the most common cause of reading difficulties.
Most reading programs focus on teaching letter-sound correspondences and phonics. While these abilities are necessary for reading, they are not sufficient to develop orthographic mapping. An effective reading program must also ensure that students develop orthographic mapping by only allowing progress when their reading and writing skills are automatic. Most reading programs fail to do this. A student might look like they are making progress, but unless they are orthographically mapping the words they learn, they will struggle once the texts they encounter place real demands on them. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as the "fourth-grade slump".
Given the role of phonemic awareness in developing fluent reading and writing, it is not surprising that students with reading difficulties often have deficits in phonemic awareness. Basic tasks like blending and segmenting are exercises in most phonics programs, but the most effective exercises are those that develop phonemic awareness to the advanced level. These exercises include phoneme deletion, substitution, and reversal. For example, in phoneme substitution, the student is given the word "cat" and asked what word they get if they replace the /t/ sound with the /p/ sound. The answer is "cap". Reading interventions that include these advanced phonemic awareness exercises have been proven to be much more effective than those that do not. The most successful of those have shown that 90 to 95 percent of students can read to grade level with proper instruction.
Many other reading programs also do not include a spelling component. Spelling is crucial for developing orthographic mapping because it forces the student to retrieve the exact sequence of letters in a word. This is a much more demanding task than reading, which can be done with partial information. By including dictation lessons, Pictures Are For Babies ensures that students develop correct spelling of the words they previously encountered in reading lessons.
There are programs that are based on orthographic mapping and include advanced phonemic awareness exercises and spelling, such as Heggerty and Equipped for Reading Success. However, these programs provide a static curriculum and let the responsibility of implementing them with fidelity to educators. Pictures Are For Babies, on the other hand, uses a deliberate practice engine to ensure that students receive optimal lessons based on their previous performance and proven strategies of expert performance and optimal learning. Educators are freed from the burden of lesson planning and can focus on providing high-quality whole-class instruction and individual tutoring to struggling students.
While the Lite version of Pictures Are For Babies does not contain the full curriculum, it provides most of what is covered in Pre-K to K-2 classrooms. It includes the alphabet, common symbols, and words from "cat", "strip", "claim", to "drown". Because research has shown that even a few dozen hours of proper instruction on advanced phonemic awareness can remediate reading difficulties that were resistant to years of improper instruction, the Lite version should be able to prevent most reading difficulties in Pre-K to K-2 students from developing. It can also help older students who did not receive proper instruction in those grades to catch up with their peers.