Six things, one at a time.
Every one of these exists because marking a child’s writing well is slow, and doing it badly is worse than not doing it.
They pick what they read about
A bored child does not get better at reading. Your child picks the subjects they actually care about, and every passage they are given comes from those.
A parent can add subjects of their own: semiconductors, money management, real estate, Chinese history. Your child learns about them and their reading improves at the same time.
Typing one word reaches related subjects across the whole library rather than matching letters, so searching for sports also finds sports medicine over in the living world category.
- Sport and gamesWhole category
- Soccer chosen
- Basketball
- Formula One
- Sports medicine, filed under living world, matched because it is about sport.
We meet your child where they are
Not where their school year says they should be. Their level is measured in the first few passages and moves as they do, so the reading is always just hard enough.
Difficulty is one continuous ladder rather than a set of grade boxes. Your child climbs it a step at a time and is never shown a grade, a level number or another child’s score. You see all of it.
Every passage is about something that really happened, and every number in one is checked against the source it came from.
Soccer. 650L to 700L, which is a reading range rather than a grade. 395 words.
Two teams walked out at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on 19 July 2026. It was the World Cup final, and 80,663 people were in the seats.
Argentina was the champion from the last World Cup, back in 2022. No country had won two World Cups in a row since 1962.
The ladder runs in small steps from the very first reader up to adult level reading. Nobody jumps.
Any word, tapped, explained and read aloud
Every single word is tappable, not just the hard ones, because nobody can guess which word a particular child does not know.
The explanation comes back written at their reading level rather than a dictionary’s, with the word used in sentences they can follow.
Argentina was the champion. They had…
- What it means
- The team or person who won last time, and who keeps the title until somebody beats them.
- Similar words
- winner, title holder, victor
- Used in a sentence
- Our school became the champion of the district without losing a match.
A tutor they can ask about the passage
Your child can ask about the passage in front of them, and nothing else. It is the question they were too shy to put their hand up for, and the answer comes back at their reading level rather than an adult’s.
Scoped to the passage on purpose. A general chat bot on a children’s product is a different thing with different risks, and this is not one.
But I thought Messi was amazing?
He is one of the best players of the last ten years. But one player cannot win a match on their own, and it takes a whole team. On this day, Spain played much better than Argentina did.
Marked the way a teacher marks
The marking is built against published teaching rubrics and calibrated on thousands of real answers that trained scorers already scored against those same rubrics.
Your child sees the score and, far more importantly, exactly what was missing and which part of the rubric it belonged to.
Spelling and grammar are marked separately from understanding, so a child who understood the passage is not marked down twice for one misspelling.
What was the score after the first ninety minutes, and what stopped Spain from scoring?
nothing to nothing becuase the goalie was good.
1out of 2Almost there
- The score is right. Saying the goalie was good is not what the passage says: name him and say how many saves.Command of evidence
- The word becuase should be because.Conventions
And they see what a full answer looks like
Two of them. One is their own words with the smallest possible changes, so they can see how close they were. The other is written from scratch.
Showing only a model answer reads as a rebuke and teaches nothing about the gap between what a child wrote and what would have earned the mark.
An answer that is not there yet is never marked in red, and a child is never shown the score another child got.
nothing to nothing becuase because the goalie was good. Emiliano Martínez made eleven saves.
After the first ninety minutes the score was nothing to nothing. Spain did not score because Argentina’s goalkeeper, Emiliano Martínez, made eleven saves, which is more than any goalkeeper has ever made in a World Cup final.
What you see as the parent
You see everything your child sees, plus the things they do not: the grade equivalent, where they sit on the ladder, and how that has moved. The screens are deliberately the same where they overlap, so you can sit next to your child and talk about the same thing rather than comparing two different views.
StratoReading is being built, and nothing is charged for it yet. Accounts open in stages while we make sure a child's writing is looked after properly. If they are not open where you are reading this, the sign in page says so instead of taking your address.
StratoReading’s pricing is already settled and published on the pricing page.