Course

🗺️ OUR 6-WEEK READING ROADMAP

Week 1: Staying in One Spot & The “Looking Lion” Strategy

Stamina Goal: 3–4 minutes of independent reading. Your child will learn how to pick a reading spot, stay there the whole time, and use the Looking Lion strategy to look at pictures to figure out the meaning of unknown words.

Week 2: Building Focus & The “Chunky Monkey” Strategy

Stamina Goal: 5–6 minutes of independent reading. We will build on our stamina and introduce Chunky Monkey, teaching your child how to spot small words hiding inside big, intimidating words to decode them easily.

Week 3: Growing Stamina & The “Stretchy Snake” Strategy

Stamina Goal: 7–8 minutes of independent reading. As reading times grow, your child will learn Stretchy Snake—the classic, essential skill of sounding out letters and blending them smoothly together.

Week 4: Reaching 10 Minutes & The “Lips the Fish” Strategy

Stamina Goal: 9–10 minutes of independent reading (a huge milestone!). Your child will learn the Lips the Fish strategy, teaching them to mouth the very first sound of a word to unlock tricky words quickly without getting frustrated.

Week 5: Becoming Fluent & The “Flippy Dolphin” Strategy

Stamina Goal: 11–12 minutes of independent reading. We tackle vowel sounds with Flippy Dolphin. Your child will learn how to “flip” a vowel sound from short to long when a word doesn’t sound quite right.

Week 6: The Independent Reader Graduation & The “Skippy Frog” Strategy

Stamina Goal: 13–15 full minutes of beautiful, independent reading! Our final strategy is Skippy Frog, where your child learns context clues by skipping a stuck word, reading to the end of the sentence, and hopping back to figure it out. We wrap up the week celebrating your child’s amazing growth!

(Bonus Weeks 7-8 extend stamina to 16-20 minutes once your child has mastered all 6 strategies.)

Start Course Continue Course Retake Course Preview Course Learn More
Retake this course?
Retaking this course from the beginning will reset all of your tracked progress.
Retake

Meet Your Instructor

Hi, I’m Jesi — a former elementary teacher (13 years in the classroom) and now a therapist working with kids and families. Teaching showed me how many kids the system wasn’t built for; counseling showed me why: real learning can’t happen until a child feels grounded enough to try. That’s what this course is built on. Every strategy here is designed to give your child two things at once — real reading skills, and the confidence and self-regulation to sit with something hard without giving up. I built these lessons to be playful, encouraging, and paced for how kids actually learn best: one small, believable win at a time.

A woman with short, wavy hair smiling at sunset, wearing a gray cardigan over a black top, with a necklace showing a leaf-shaped tattoo on her chest.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • Just a few minutes a day, and it grows with your child. Week 1 starts with a 3-4 minute reading run, building gradually up to 20 minutes by the bonus weeks. Between the short video and the timed reading, most days take about 10-15 minutes total, and you can always pause and pick back up if a week gets busy.

  • Just books your child enjoys at their current reading level. Everything else is included the moment you enroll: printable stamina trackers, an activity sheet for each animal strategy, and reflection logs — print them out or fill them in digitally on a tablet.

  • That’s normal, and it’s actually part of what this course is built to handle. Every strategy pairs the reading skill with the confidence and self-regulation to sit with something hard without giving up. If a session goes sideways, it’s completely fine to stop, take a break, and pick the same lesson back up tomorrow.

  • Yes! You get lifetime access. Come back anytime to repeat a strategy lesson, refresh a skill your child hasn’t quite locked in, or reuse the timed reading runs to keep building stamina.

  • 8 Weeks to Independent Reading is built for early readers — roughly kindergarten through 3rd grade — who already know some letter sounds and words but need practice building the stamina, strategies, and confidence to read on their own. If your child gets frustrated fast, loses focus after a page or two, or still needs someone sitting right next to them, this is exactly the gap the course closes.