Why affordable reading support for struggling elementary kids is hard to find (and who I’m looking to connect with)
Last Tuesday, I sat cross-legged on my 8-year-old’s bedroom floor folding laundry while he read his assigned chapter book out loud. He stumbled over “separate” for the third time, let his shoulders drop, and snapped the book shut so hard the corner of a bookmark poked through the cover. He threw it under his bed and said he was never reading again. I didn’t argue. I’ve been here before. My son is dyslexic, and we’ve spent two years testing every solution the school recommends, and every trick I remember from my time teaching third grade. Orton-Gillingham tutoring is $120 an hour, which we can fit in once a month, not the three times a week research says works best. The free take-home materials the school sends home are just repetitive worksheets that make him hate reading more than he already does. I’ve tried a dozen popular EdTech reading apps: half are so over-gamified he just ignores the reading part to collect cartoon rewards, and the other half charge $15 a month that a lot of families in my working-class area can’t afford on top of rent and groceries.
Six months ago, I started doing my own small experiment. I started writing 100-word decodable passages tailored to my son’s current phonics goal and his obsession with all things construction. One week we were working on consonant clusters, so I wrote a story about a dump truck named Max that helps build a new playground at the city park. No random sentences about “the cat sat on the mat.” It took me 10 minutes after the kids went to bed each Sunday. Within a month, he stopped fighting reading time. A few other parents at my elementary school heard what I was doing, asked for copies, and started asking for passages for their own kids’ interests—one for a kid who loves mermaids, another for a kid who’s obsessed with space. My cousin, who works as a junior developer, offered to help me turn the collection into a simple free mobile app prototype, just for fun. We tested it with 12 struggling readers at our school over the last three months, and 10 of them improved their reading fluency by at least 15 words per minute. That’s a bigger jump than most of the kids saw with their existing after-school intervention programs.
This isn’t just a side project for me, actually. There’s a simple takeaway here that any parent or teacher can use right now, no funding or coding required. If you’re a parent of a struggling reader, you don’t have to wait for the school or a fancy app to give you something that works. Pull up the phonics skill your kid is working on that week from their latest progress report, open a Google doc, and write 3 or 4 short paragraphs about whatever they love. If they love soccer, write about their last weekend game. You don’t have to be a great writer. It just has to be about something they care about, and use the sound patterns they’re practicing. I’ve shared this trick with half a dozen families now, and every parent has told me it cuts down on after-school reading fights more than any app or worksheet they’ve tried. If you’re a teacher, try this small shift: next month, ask three parents of struggling readers what their biggest at-home stress is around reading. I’d bet most don’t say their kid isn’t learning enough. They say it’s the fighting, the tears, the feeling that they’re failing their kid because they can’t afford private tutoring. Small, low-stress, interest-aligned practice fixes that way faster than any fancy packaged program.
That’s the thing, though. Right now this is just me and my cousin working on this on weekends, after we get our own kids to bed and finish the laundry and answer our regular work emails. We want to add hundreds more stories, make it work for kids from first through fifth grade, and get it into the hands of every teacher and parent who wants it for free, no subscriptions required. But I don’t know how to take that next step. I’ve never written a grant proposal before. I don’t have connections to organizations that work on literacy access for low-income schools. I don’t know how to avoid the obvious mistakes that sink small community-led projects. That’s why I’m putting this out here: I’m actively looking to connect with people who work in spaces that overlap with this work.
If you’re a classroom teacher who works with struggling readers, I’d love to hear what gaps you see that current tools don’t fill. I can send you the prototype for free right now to test with your kids, and I just want your honest feedback. If you work in EdTech and care about building free tools for underserved communities, I’d love to hear how you keep small projects sustainable without locking them behind paywalls. If you work in social impact, CSR, or at an NGO focused on education equity, I want to know what small grassroots projects actually get supported, because most of the funding guidelines I’ve read feel like they’re written for big established organizations, not parent-led projects. If you do community building around public education, or work at a startup focused on accessible learning, I’d love to grab a coffee or a 20-minute zoom call to pick your brain. I don’t have a fancy pitch deck, just a Google folder full of decodable stories and a stack of notes from parents saying this is the first thing their kid hasn’t fought them on.
Last week, my son read the whole dump truck story out loud without stopping once, and then asked if I could write one about a cement mixer next week. That’s the whole win I need right now. I don’t need to build a big company or get featured in an education magazine. I just want this to get to more families that need it, because I know how it feels to sit on the bedroom floor while your kid throws their book and think you have no good options. Right now, I’m still learning, still messing up the grant applications, still adding one story a week when I have time. I know I can’t get this further alone. If that’s you, or you know someone who might want to connect, send me a note.
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