LightHouse Reader provides students with an authentic reading experience while also collecting data through embedded Cloze (fill-in-blank) assessments.
These assessments are placed through a special engine created in partnership with MetaMetrics. As students read, a word is covered up. Students select the word they think best fits n the blank from a list of four options, receive immediate feedback – and then continue reading. Cloze items appear every 1 to 2 pages in all English titles except plays, poetry, and graphic novels.
Clozes allow LightHouse Reader to monitor a children's Lexile® measure, helping identify where that child is on the spectrum of reading comprehension. The more time a child spends reading and answering Cloze items, the more frequently LightHouse Reader adjusts Lexile® levels to reflect a child's level of comprehension.
Imagine your child with reading struggles being able to enjoy any book! With over 21 features focused on helping children who struggle with Dyslexia, ADHD, ADD, Autism, Vision Impairment, Cortical Vision Impairment, mind Wandering and other reading struggles, Lighthouse Reader will do just that. Bring the joy back to reading!
Key features include:
• Top and bottom shading
• Block words already read and those about to read
• Text to speech and karaoke modes
• Modify text format and color
• And many more..
Fluency Assessments is an extremely powerful feature that helps a child with word pronunciation, spelling, and reading fluency. A parent or tutor can assign read aloud and writing assignments, as well as gage progress with on demand data.
Running Record scores based on words correct per minute. As you listen to your child reading you can mark inaccuracies including your notes.
Grade using Rubrics. Use Lighthouse provided Fluency Rubrics or Create your own.
Access over 150,000 books from both Christian and Secular authors: like Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Wonder, A series of Unfortunate events and many others. Many selections align directly with curriculum like, Sonlight, ABeka, and Bookshark, to name just a few. Children are able to begin reading as soon as purchase is complete.
A great tool that combines reading and spelling. Who remembers the excitement of the school spelling bee! LightHouse Reader matches the book lexile level and provides a spelling bee on the same level. This ensures that your child is taking a spelling assessment at their level.
This feature includes the following:
How do we combine the 21st century with reading? How can we bring pen pals and book clubs into the modern era? Enter LightHouse Book Chat. Your child will instantly connect with children their age and level reading the same books. Children can chat about the books they love in a safe parent controlled environment.
Forget the days of chaotic homework, when your child says, "I can’t find the paper", or the dog ate it. LightHouse Reader provides a simple homework platform with minutes tracking and gamification.
Our homework tool encompasses both one time and repetitive assignments. A parent can choose to assign specific books, and a total of required minutes to read.
When the child reads during homework time the platform will keep track of their reading minutes and inform them once they have completed their homework assignment.
Badges will be given based on completion success
Everyone loves tournaments, whether you are a March Madness fan, soccer fan, or video gamer. Tournaments are fun! As a parent you can create your own reading tournament and invite your friends to join by giving them a special code.
As a child you can actively search for existing and ongoing tournaments and request permission to join. Tournament metrics include reading minutes, number of books read and much more. The tournament creator gets to choose prizes and badges for winners. Both parents and children will view a tournament leaderboard including ranking and totals.
When reading a good book, we have all experienced the feeling of wanting to share our thoughts and discuss the book in detail with others. With LightHouse Book Clubs, your child can do just that.
Any parent can create a Book Club or search for an existing Club to allow their child to join. When a parent creates a Club, they have full control over who they allow to participate. Together, the Club will read a book chosen by the creating parent and engage in chats geared towards discussion of the book. LightHouse reader provides questions to help lead the discussion.
The Book Club chats are designed for parents and children alike. Clubs can be set up as a one-time session, discussing a single book, or for multiple sessions with multiple books and preset cycles.
With technology constantly changing the need for parental control is more necessary than ever before. As parents, we want our children to reap the benefits of modern technology while staying protected from its potential ills.
Lighthouse Reader provides a parent full control and oversight on all its features.
A parent can:
-View all book chats, turn off chats, remove a child from a chat
-Limit chat to book clubs and clubhouse
-Turn off social media sharing
-Hide books from your child’s library
-and much more…
Lighthouse Reader provides an easy and simple format for viewing all parts of speech words in a text. Turning on the feature will show an easy to read menu with all parts of speech words in the viewed text.
Each parts of speech section is color coded and highlighted in the text so the child can match the word in the text.
Introducing LightHouse Clubhouse. A Clubhouse is a child’s domain, and the child is the king or queen of their own mini-kingdom.
How does this work?
A parent creates a Clubhouse, and the child invites their trusted friends with parental approval. Then, the children get to chat about any book or topic in a fun, safe, parentally supervised virtual Clubhouse.
• Goals are set by the parent and can be daily, weekly or monthly. The parent can add gifting with personal messaging. Gifting is to attach a gift based on goal completion
• Milestones are set by the child and are incremental. The child is encouraged to set miletones for minutes and books read
As a child reads, they encounter cloze (fill in the blank) assessments and spelling bee assessments. The child can also retake cloze and spelling assessments that were answered incorrectly.
The parent can then view all cloze and spelling assessments including retakes so they can get a full view of the child’s vocabulary
As a parent / caregiver, your primary objective is to provide your children with the tools and support for success and happiness. By using LightHouse Reader’s Guided Reader suite of features, you can increase your child’s academic growth and overall confidence through focused, relevant and enjoyable books and content. LightHouse Reader’s Guided Reader automatically and seamlessly highlights the text at the point of activation and enters the guided reading mode, both decreasing distractions and increasing engagement with the text.
As a parent / caregiver, your primary objective is to provide your children with the tools and support for success and happiness. By using LightHouse Reader’s Guided Reader suite of features, you can increase your child’s academic growth and overall confidence through focused, relevant and enjoyable books and content. LightHouse Reader’s Guided Reader automatically and seamlessly highlights the text at the point of activation and enters the guided reading mode, both decreasing distractions and increasing engagement with the text.
As a parent / caregiver, your primary objective is to provide your children with the tools and support for success and happiness. By using LightHouse Reader’s Guided Reader suite of features, you can increase your child’s academic growth and overall confidence through focused, relevant and enjoyable books and content. LightHouse Reader’s Guided Reader automatically and seamlessly highlights the text at the point of activation and enters the guided reading mode, both decreasing distractions and increasing engagement with the text.
My Journal is a space especially for your child’s personal notes and thoughts. It can be both a reading journal, integrated with their library, and a regular diary.
As a reading journal, My Journal gives your child the ability to record their thoughts, questions, and favorite quotes directly from the books they are reading. From any book, they can access their journal and see all their entries. From there, they can create a new entry, edit previous ones, select text from the book to quote, and include citations with the click of a button.
But their My Journal entries do not have to be associated with their reading. My Journal is accessible from the main menu on your child’s dashboard, and it can be a space for them to write about whatever topic they choose. Children can create entries about anything from how their day went, to what they did on vacation, to their personal thoughts and dreams.
Building your library within LightHouse Reader is one of the most exciting aspects of the platform. When you first purchase LightHouse Reader, you receive ten free books to begin your library. Next, just like your bookshelves at home, you begin curating individual titles and bundles of books perfectly suited for your homeschooling needs from tens of thousands of available books. A parent can also add funds to a child’s online wallet, allowing them to make book purchases, or a child can send a request to their parent for a particular book they would like to read.
The first time your child logs on to LightHouse Reader they take a survey about their reading interests. Based on this survey, LightHouse Reader prioritizes the genres and topics your child will see first. Your child’s library will suggest books that are popular on the platform and relevant to your child’s interests or related to other books they have read. A child can “check out” up to ten books at a time, which will be displayed in their Continue Reading section. And they can curate their own virtual bookshelf to read in the future with the My List feature.
Video has the ability to engage, educate, and entertain like nothing else does. That is why LightHouse Reader places that power in the hands of parents, allowing them to integrate educational video content with reading and writing assignments to enhance their homeschooling curriculum.
On a child’s dashboard, their video library appears next to their reading library. Here they can access any videos they have unlocked, watch or continue watching, browse videos by genre, see video suggestions based on their interests and reading activity, and add videos to their personal list for future viewing. The high-quality videos are interconnected with your child’s reading library. When a child reads a book related video content will be suggested and vice versa.
As with any other LightHouse feature, videos are entirely at a parent’s discretion. You, the parent, set the parameters for how many videos a child may unlock and which ones you feel are suitable. You may specify that your child must read a certain number of minutes to unlock a video, allow them free access, or turn off the video feature completely.
One of the ways LightHouse Reader brings books alive for children is through action clips. Think of these as high-quality, educational gifs. LightHouse Reader has exclusively partnered with BBC Worldwide to embed thousands of these, 5 to 30 second, audio-free clips in the platform.
While video clips bring context to books as a whole, action clips are an additional layer of contextual imagery designed to bring individual words or phrases to life. Imagine your child is reading a book about penguins, and when they come to a sentence that references a penguin fishing - instead of a static picture - they see an amazing clip of a penguin diving and catching a fish. From a cheetah running to a baseball player hitting a homerun, action clips allow children to actually experience what they are reading. Additionally, because these clips are audio-free--literal moving pictures--they are unobtrusive and don’t interrupt, for instance, when multiple children are trying to read at once.
