Our Approach
How it works
Mentava’s early literacy program uses a direct-instruction, phonics based curriculum that draws inspiration from Orton-Gillingham and Englemann.
Our mental model is that education = curriculum + motivation.
Good education software solves both by providing an optimized curriculum, allowing kids to learn as fast as they want, and leveraging game design best practices to dramatically improve motivation.
Our results are possible without software, but it’s harder.
We generally see the most success starting around age 3.5 or later, but we have occasional (rare!) students who are developmentally capable of learning to read at age 2.
Before signing up, we encourage you to download a free copy of our Alphabet Sounds book and use the emoji test at the end to see if your child is developmentally capable of understanding left-to-right reading order.
Mentava is not private school. It is not intended as a wholesale replacement for your child's regular school. Nor do we want to be your child's "school after the school day".
Our vision is to allow your child to continue being part of their local school community, attending school with peers their own age, but without restrictions on their pace of their learning.
Due to our students' age, the program requires some adult supervision, decreasing significantly over the year as a child's ability to teach themselves improves.
We can provide additional support to you to build the soft skills that support effective learning, like dealing with frustration and celebrating progress.
How long does Mentava take?
Mentava's reading curriculum is intended to take a student with no prior literacy instruction and turn them into an independent reader. With daily progress, we expect our program to take less than a year, with a goal of achieving basic reading fluency in preparation for math.
Currently, there are about 120 levels in Mentava, made up of about 2300 learning activities. With 30 minutes of daily practice, students generally finish a level in 1-3 days.
The first 20 levels focus on the kindergarten reading curriculum, while levels 21-96 roughly align with the Common Core 1st grade curriculum.
Our remaining ~25 levels focus on 2nd grade concepts (sight words and non-standard letter combinations like soft “g”, “igh”, “tch”, etc) with the goal of transitioning kids into independent reading of physical books as quickly as possible.
To make this transition smoother, we organize and batch our sight words and letter combinations to quickly prepare kids for specific books. For example, we teach “-ould”, “-ouse”, and “there/where/here” to prepare kids to read Green Eggs and Ham on their own. (“Would you eat them here or there? Would you, could you in a house?”)
After level 104, students will be able to read Green Eggs and Ham. After level 109, they’ll be able to read Hop on Pop. Level 112 prepares students for the Today I Will Fly (the Elephant and Piggie book), level 115 gets through The Eye Book, level 117 covers Are You My Mother, and level 120 (activity 2342) is Waiting is Not Easy.
From there we're continuing to add content to scaffold out other beginning reader books, but we encourage families to transition away from our software and into reading mostly physical books whenever it feels right to them.
“You guys changed our lives. There’s not a world where I would teach a child to read without your app.”
- Nolan Church