ATTN: SCHOOL LIBRARIANS

(*when students can read well enough to use them)

Nearly two-thirds of all U.S. children cannot read on grade level. For many of them, reading is a laborious and frustrating experience that causes them to feel bad about themselves. It is little wonder they do not voluntarily frequent libraries.

We want to work with you to make your library dramatically better able to help these kids.  Together we can make your library a place where any student, regardless of their reading skills, background knowledge, or primary language, can receive individualized instruction and support while they are reading anything, on any device, in your library.

We call this tool the “Magic Ladder”.  Students can learn to use it on their own in just minutes. By following a few simple steps, it improves their reading by helping them learn to recognize and understand any unfamiliar word they encounter.  (Try it now, click on any word in the paragraphs of this page and keep clicking through the hints until you hear the word sounded-out)

This is not a complicated human-led or computer-based ‘course’ of reading instruction. Instead, the Magic Ladder is a tool that turns every single word, on virtually every page of the internet, into its own reading tutor and support system. Rather than kids having to remember and apply abstract rules to work-out unfamiliar words, The Magic Ladder provides visible and audible pronunciation cues, animated sound-outs, definitions, synonyms, and multiple translations – and it does so instantly on-demand, during the real-time flow of the students’ reading.

The only thing learners need to do is click or touch every word they don’t know and keep clicking it until they do. By this simple process, reading difficulties will no longer bar access to learning from and enjoying online content. By this simple process, each word they don’t know becomes a confidence imbuing environment for improving reading. It’s inevitably the way of the future.

You can find out more about the Magic Ladder by visiting these pages:

Magic Ladder Stewards Page   –   About the Magic Ladder

The Magic Ladder Library: https://mlc.learningstewards.org/ includes over 200 stories that have the Magic Ladder built-in.

The Magic Ladder Chrome Extension: https://goo.gl/cLvVYC adds the Magic Ladder to your library’s computers and works with millions of pages on the internet.

The Magic Ladder “MyStuff” feature: https://mlc.learningstewards.org/help/#mystuff  enables librarians to share documents with students that open with Magic Ladder help and support.

The Magic Ladder Copy-Paste-PQ feature: https://mlc.learningstewards.org/help/#paste-pq allows you or your students to copy ANY content from any source and paste it into a window with built-in Magic Ladder support.

The Magic Ladder Embed Code: https://mlc.learningstewards.org/about/#embed A short and simple html script that adds the Magic Ladder to every word in any webpage or website your library controls (for examples: Story Preservation Initiative, The Hechinger Report,Children of the Code, Learning Stewards).