[tdekken]

Congratulations on launching! I love the combination of an app coupled with physical books. It really demonstrates your understanding of your customers.

* I would love to know more about your phonics instruction. From what I can see, Ello embeds the instruction into the "help the child sound out the words" component. Is that correct or is more systematic instruction provided?

* How do you help children overcome the seemingly maddening inconsistency of the English language? For example, the long a sound can correspond to the a, ai, eigh, aigh, ay, er (RP), et, ei, au, a_e, ea, and ey graphemes.

* Does your speech recognition system understand at the phoneme level?

BTW, I would love to connect. I am an independent educational researcher and early literacy edtech founder. My background is big tech (principal engineer at a FAANG company) and am now navigating the treacherous waters of building an audience, securing funding, bringing in experts, etc.

Best of luck!

[tomsayer]

Great questions! - When a child makes a mistake or needs help we take the child through a phonics decoding exercise (scaffolded 'sounding it out'.) Right now we support reading practice rather than provide full systematic instruction - i.e. we don't replace the rigorous, structured program a child should get in school. However, we are working right now on building out our own scope and sequence and detailed phonics instruction and hope to add that soon. - This one is beyond me and I don't want to pretend to be the expert here. That's Elizabeth and Lauren. Let's definitely connect and I'll get an answer from them. - Our speech recognition system does an OK job at the phoneme level. We are releasing an updated model that will go hand in hand with the scope and sequence that should be the best there is and be great at the phoneme level.

Would love to connect. My email is my first name at our company url!

Tom