Your Questions And Answers

Here are the most frequent questions that we get:

It all sounds great, but why have I not heard of you before?

Easyread has been in development since early 2000. But you are right that we have only recently started advertising it more widely. All I can suggest is that I put you in touch with one of the thousands of parents and schools that has used Easyread. They can tell you what they have seen with their own eyes.

Is Easyread a Charity or Business?

Oxford Learning Solutions is run as a social enterprise. All profit is ploughed back into new systems for making learning easier for every child. We are currently working on a foundation reading course, an adult reading course, language learning systems and a maths aid.

I am in the USA. Can I sign up?

Yes, we can deliver Easyread anywhere in the world without a problem.

My child is 9. Would Easyread still be suitable for her?

Yes. We have a lot of children come through in the 7-9 range, because that is where you start to see a child drop behind. We also have teenagers work through the course successfully. As each year goes by the bad habits get more ingrained. So progress can be easier for a 7-year-old than a 9-year-old. But we get there in the end.

My child is pre-school. Is it too soon to start?

We have a steady flow of younger children do the course. You can repeat the lessons as much as you want, so we recommend going through the foundation course quite slowly. But the good news is that your child will be going in the right direction. And there is no hurry. You can take a break and come back to it if necessary.

My child is 14. Is that too old for Easyread?

This will depend on your child. Easyread is formatted to be fun and easy for 6-9 year-old children. If your child is happy to work with the format we use, then it can get the same results with a teenager that it does with a younger child.

How do we get the lessons?

You create an account on our website and then log on for each lesson using the link at the top left corner of our home page. All the lessons are delivered over the Internet and so you can access them from anywhere. And each lesson will wait until your child logs on the next time.

How long is each lesson?

We keep the lessons incredibly short. The absolute maximum time we suggest that you ever spend on a lesson is 15 minutes. Many are 5-10 minutes. People sometimes comment "I have seen amazing progress, but I can't believe it is coming from your very short lessons". Yes, I can get a little irritable about it, when the child has gone nowhere in 3 years and is now progressing well after just 2-3 months!

We keep the lessons very short for a whole rack of neural and psychological reasons. The short lessons get much better results than longer lessons.

How long is the course?

There are 223 lessons and 25,000 words in the course. It is divided into four levels.

Everyone does level 1, the foundation. From that moment your child can upgrade to a level that is appropriate. The lessons in each level get longer. The final level is complex text with jokes, riddles and technical factual information.

Our aim is to achieve "reading takeoff", where your child is reading whatever he or she wants. That normally takes 2-8 months. Sometimes less, sometimes more. Our record is a parent who wrote with delight that just the minicourse had made the penny drop for her child. For other children it can be a much more incremental process.

How far does Easyread go?

The text through the second half of the course is long and complex. It is certainly well above the average level of text read by most elementary school pupils.

My child is dyslexic. Will Easyread help?

There are several causes of dyslexia and we focus on those. We find there is usually a solution once you know why someone is struggling to read. So yes, Easyread will usually help.

My child has learning difficulties. Would Easyread be suitable?

We have many children with learning difficulties do Easyread and get good progress. It does take longer and they may still be quite slow readers. But it almost always does get good progress for them.

Do I need to sit with my child?

There is no fixed answer to this. Many children like to do their lessons on their own. Others like to have a parent sitting with them.

Your input is certainly crucial, but it is mainly in the area of encouragement and excitement. We provide all the input required with the multi-media lessons. The audio instructions should be able to guide your child through without a problem.

So it can save you, personally, a huge amount of time. Life is pretty busy as a parent. Many parents comment on how it lifts a weight off them.

Will it conflict with what my child is learning at school?

Most children doing Easyread are also learning to read at school and we have never had any instance where a problem has arisen from confusion over two parallel courses.

The truth is that Easyread gets results about 4 or 5 times faster than most conventioinal teaching systems. So what's happening at school becomes fairly irrelevant and the children seem quite capable of dealing with two approaches at once. In fact, I think it is usually a help.

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