The project is designed for parents of young children who would like to support their child’s reading and language development.

I’m especially enthusiastic about teaching parents of children 0-5, but I have a lot to share with parents of older children, with teachers, and anyone who wants to know more about how to effectively teach reading.

To me it’s quite simple: there are things any parent can do from the very beginning that are great for their children’s language development.

This starts with basic, universally-recommended things like a lot of responsive “serve-and-return” conversational interactions and reading a lot of books together from as early as possible (I have some suggestions on how to have a great time with both).

Whether or not you eventually decide to actually teach your child yourself like I did (phonics and all), I believe that learning what goes into teaching a child to read is also definitely worth it.

Teaching my kid to read early was an incredibly fun and rewarding experience for me, and I want to encourage as many parents as possible to give it a try.

That doesn’t mean I think going “all in” is for everyone and definitely not that parents should stress out about reading early or feel guilty for not doing more to support their child.

Ultimately, I treat good parent-child reading instruction as a beautiful thing that I just want more parents to enjoy.

I’ll answer this with a simple No.

If that’s your goal I won’t judge you, but that’s just not my thing.

Personally, I’ve always cared a lot more about having a thoughtful, curious kid who loves reading than about future academic excellence.

For me, this whole endeavour is about promoting a love of reading and language, not about maximising cognitive ability for its own sake (and I’ll just leave it at that).

I’ll start by saying that there isn’t one single overarching method that I personally adhere to or advocate.

What there is is a wealth of solid, helpful research on different aspects of reading instruction and language development—including certain things there is broad consensus on among reading researchers. (The call to take this research seriously is often labeled as “The Science of Reading,” and although I was definitely inspired by the idea, I have mixed feelings about the term and how it is sometimes used by its advocates.)

My own aim is to do two separate things:

The first is to give parents an overview of the most essential, widely-accepted research and recommendations I think they should know about.

The second is to share my own suggestions on how to create a fun language-rich home environment and work on foundational reading skills (including phonics) in a way that I believe a small child would enjoy.

Ultimately, I’m here to share the things that I find to be the most helpful for parents, and I aim to always be extra clear about my sources, my level of certainty, and what I know and what I don’t know.

There is no one answer to this.

There are different levels in which parents can engage, from basic awareness and all the way to making work on reading a meaningful, regular part of their lives.

When it comes to actual instruction, from my personal experience, a little bit of consistency for a few minutes a day can go a really long way, especially if both you and your kid are having fun with it.

Whatever time or effort you have to devote to reading, though, my attitude is the same: I’m here to share everything I know, and how much of it you end up doing is up to you (and your kid, of course).

I am categorically against promising parents specific results— We are all different, our situations are different, our children are different, and we have different amounts of time and energy to dedicate to this.

I really don’t want to lead anyone to fixate on reaching this or that crazy milestone.

What I do want is to invite parents to understand what kind of things help reading and language development and to do more of that to the best of their ability (in a relaxed way that’s fun for both them and their child!).

Our story is definitely unique, and it’s important to keep in mind that it is just one case of well-informed, well-rounded reading instruction which incidentally started really (really) early and went really well...

Moreover, there is very little research on teaching children as early as I taught my daughter and (if it isn’t obvious) no research on doing exactly everything that we did as we did it.

The reason I believe other parents can learn a lot from our story, though, is that I know my daughter’s reading was a case of very gradual, step-by-step skill acquisition—there were no surprises or any unexpected leaps in ability.

Because I’ve been through every part of the process and have seen the abilities build from the ground up, I feel I have a lot to share about the different stages, about how to get kids excited about learning their letters, and about what goes into raising a super enthusiastic early reader.

Generally, my scheduling policy is quite simple and straightforward: when you buy a lesson through my scheduling page, you pay in advance. You can reschedule the lesson up to 24 hours before the lesson, based on availability.

Of course, if you have a last minute emergency or something that prevents you from attending, I will try my best to be considerate and find you another time. I really want everyone who comes into contact with me and with this project to have a positive experience and to be better off for it.

If you have any specific question or request regarding scheduling, just contact me directly at adam@earlyreadingproject.com and tell me what’s on your mind.

You can find a pretty clear explanation of my refund policy in the Terms and Conditions part of the website.