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    Testimonials

    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.
    • Can I evaluate Pictures Are For Babies before purchasing?
      • Yes. The Lite version includes the first 200 lessons which cover teaching reading and spelling all letter sounds, simple CVC, CCVC, and CVCC words, and sentences with those words. It is offered for free for evaluation purposes and as a professional-level tool for early detection, prevention, and remediation of reading difficulties.
    • Has Pictures Are For Babies been scientifically evaluated?
      • Not yet. Due to funding constraints and the desire to have an independent evaluation, Pictures Are For Babies has not yet undergone a randomized controlled trial published in a peer-reviewed journal. Any literacy researcher interested in conducting one is encouraged to contact the developer to discuss the matter. Full licenses for the software will be provided free of charge to anyone interested in performing an independent evaluation.
    • Does Pictures Are For Babies work?
      • Yes. Even in the absence of a proper controlled trial, you can be assured that Pictures Are For Babies works, as was explicitly designed to follow the principles of the most effective reading interventions ever documented in the scientific literature. These interventions have shown life-changing improvements for all children, especially those with reading difficulties. They have shown that with proper instruction focused on the actual mechanisms that enable fluent reading, over 90% of children can achieve grade-level reading skills. Pictures Are For Babies was explicitly designed replicate these results.
    • How is Pictures Are For Babies different from other reading apps?
      • Most reading apps fall into Dr. Kilpatrick’s "Moderate" category. They teach basic letter sounds and blending, but they fail to train advanced phonemic proficiency (the ability to manipulate individual sounds within words). Without this "missing link," children may learn to "sound out" words but will struggle to instantly recognize them.

    Pictures Are For Babies was released very recently and is still gathering testimonials. If you use the software and would like to provide one, please write to the contact email. Once they are available, they will be shown here. In the meantime, the Lite version includes the first 200 lessons which cover teaching all letter sounds, simple CVC, CCVC, and CVCC words, and sentences with those words. It is offered for free for evaluation purposes and as a professional-level tool for early detection, prevention, and remediation of reading difficulties.

    When it comes to the education of your children and students, you should not rely solely on free trials and testimonials published by the vendor. The gold standard for evaluating educational products is a randomized controlled trial published in a peer-reviewed journal. Due to funding constraints and the desire to have an independent evaluation, Pictures Are For Babies has not yet undergone such a study. Any literacy researcher interested in conducting one is encouraged to contact the above address to discuss the matter. Full licenses for the software will be provided free of charge to anyone interested in performing an independent scientific evaluation.

    However, Pictures Are For Babies was explicitly designed to follow the principles of the most effective reading interventions ever documented in the scientific literature. In particular, Pictures Are For Babies follows the framework developed by Dr. David A. Kilpatrick in chapter 11 of his book Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties. In this chapter, Dr. Kilpatrick categorized many reading interventions based on the gains they achieved in standard score point gains on nationally normed reading tests. This measure was chosen because it compares the reading growth of students against the national average and not simply against the control group.

    The categories defined by Dr. Kilpatrick are:

    • Minimal Improvement (0–5 standard score point gains): These programs often lack a phonemic awareness component or rely on the "three cueing systems" model (contextual guessing). This category includes Reading Recovery, READ 180, Repeated Readings, Great Leaps, Fast ForWord, and Failure Free Reading. Standard phonics programs like Orton-Gillingham or Wilson also fall here if they fail to address the underlying phonological-core deficit in severe cases.
    • Moderate Improvement (6–9 standard score point gains): These programs include explicit phonics and basic phonemic awareness (blending and segmenting), but do not train the skills to the point of automaticity. This includes interventions by Lovett et al. and Rashotte et al., and most standard systematic phonics instruction. Most of the usual phonics software and apps would fall into this category if they were subjected to rigorous evaluation.
    • Highly Successful (12.5–25 standard score point gains): These represent the absolute peak of reading intervention results. This group includes Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing (LiPS), Phono-Graphix, Read, Write, Type, and Discover Reading. Every program in this category shares three "active ingredients":
      • Explicit and systematic phonics instruction.
      • Aggressive training of advanced phonemic awareness skills like substitution, deletion, and reversal.
      • Ample opportunities for practice in connected text.

    The interventions in the last group represent life-changing improvements for all children, but especially for those with reading difficulties. They have shown that with proper instruction focused on the actual mechanisms that enable fluent reading, over 90% of children can achieve grade-level reading skills. Pictures Are For Babies was explicitly designed replicate these results. It contains a complete and systematic curriculum that teaches over 18,000 unique words. By making use Trane, the deliberate practice engine powering it, this amount of content is delivered optimally and tutors are warned when they need to perform one of the intervention tiers that intensively train phonemic awareness. A sentence course follows each word course to provide ample opportunities for practice in connected text.

    There are advantages to using Pictures Are For Babies over the interventions in the highly successful group. First, these interventions are typically delivered in person by highly trained tutors, which makes them expensive and difficult to scale. Second, human tutors cannot track the acquisition of the large sight vocabulary needed for fluent reading, nor do they have enough data about past performance to optimally schedule practice and more targeted interventions. Third, the curriculum of Pictures Are For Babies already covers all word and sentence reading and spelling skills to the advanced level, and future releases will add reading comprehension and writing tracks. The question is not whether Pictures Are For Babies can match the results of the best reading interventions, but whether it can surpass them and make them accessible to all students.