Launch HN: Litnerd (YC S21) – Teaching kids to read with the help of live actors

But yes, the live stream - think of it as a video conference where the artist is in character and the students go through the lessons, answer questions based on the episode they watched earlier, read out loud, do the craft activity etc.

As for the ebook - no special effect (yet!) but working on that!

No close caption yet. We are 5 months old so definitely a lot of this will be what we look to add as our product offering grows. For now, we've been focussed on curriculum, episode content with actors, and scaling out our interactive teachers streamed into classrooms.

What I’d love to see is someone who figures out how to scale and make attractive the approach of a method like 100 Easy Lessons. This is the book I give or recommend any parent whose child is struggling with reading (whether at home or at school.)

I’m a parent, and married to a parent and opinionated educator, for the record.

- I'm honestly baffled by spending so much time on one book (program?) in a classroom context. I imagine some kids won't be interested in the particular story, but it will go on for an entire month. I could see this damaging interest.

So the program time is actually 4 active periods on one book. For longer books (higher grades and more difficult Lexile scale will have some extra designated time to ensure students can finish the book but on average it is 4 periods. This includes the watching of episodes, reading out loud, lesson plans that have to be covered as part of ELA (English Language Arts) instruction anyway. High engagement level has been core to our early success but interestingly, one of the main points for improvement from teachers is that our program can feel rushed (ie desire for more designated time). We're still working through the kinks :)

- The pace seems incredibly slow. To learn to read, you need to read a lot. But this is one book per month?

Yup. We only target 9 books ie 1 book per month. Of course, we hope that students would read far more but going from no reading to some reading and carving out "reading time" to develop the habit of reading is where we come into play. Of course schools can and should continue to foster take-home reading and after school or within school time reading outside of this.

- The more stories a child is exposed to, the more chances there are to encounter something especially captivating for that child, and to spark an interest.

I agree with this.

- It's hard to believe how much participation there will be without seeing an example class and interactions between the students & actor. The videos on the site make it seem like a completely passive experience.

Legally, we cannot share that footage at all. So I'll just have to accept your disbelief here even though I wish badly I could show you otherwise :)

- Craft activities seem like a distraction from reading unless the activities are grounded in literacy (e.g. letter/word games or creations). Even then I'm kind of skeptical.

Respectfully, I don't exactly agree with that. Esp for younger ages, craft activity is a form of sensory learning. We use craft activities built to help showcase comprehension of the unit as opposed to just phonetics (though there is that aspect too). I think just evaluating our students comprehension in one medium form is limited (again, esp for younger ages).

- I predict you'll end up changing the name "litnerd". Being a nerd is cool on HN, but elsewhere?

Come on! The cat and everything? (Lit)nerds rule! ;)

I'm going to push on your deflection to legal obstacles to sharing footage though. Get parent permission and make a better example video! :)