Announcing Mentava Basics

Today we’re announcing our new Mentava Basics curriculum, aimed at kids who are still a bit too young for the standard Mentava curriculum.

Here’s what people don’t understand about teaching a 2 or 3 year old to read: 

The necessary skills for reading don’t all develop at the same time.

The ability to associate letters with sounds happens first, and at a pretty early age. If you think about it, learning “this funny shaped animal says moo” is pretty similar to learning “this funny shaped line says aaa”.

However, the second necessary skill for reading is blending those sounds together, and kids often aren’t developmentally capable of doing that until at least 6-12 months later.

Until today, our recommendation has been to wait until the child is developmentally ready to blend sounds. And then we just go full speed and teach them everything all at once, as fast as possible.

But sometimes we have students who start a little too young. And then their parents are confused, because they see that their kids are having a ton of fun learning letter sounds super fast, but then are being gatekept from additional learning because they aren't yet developmentally ready to blend those sounds.

That’s why we created the new Mentava Basics curriculum. Mentava Basics lets our youngest students focus on letter/sound pairings until they're developmentally ready to begin blending them.

Mentava Basics takes the fun and delight of the core Mentava experience, but applies it to a curriculum that’s developmentally appropriate for even younger children. Mentava’s standard curriculum is still the fastest way to go from zero to reading, but with Mentava Basics now we can give kids a bit of a head start by helping them learn their letter sounds in advance.

If you're the kind of parent who's going to be teaching your kid letter sounds while waiting for them to get old enough for Mentava, we figured we could make that process easier and more fun for you. Or if your child is struggling with blending and you think it may just be a developmental readiness issue, you can use the grownup menu to switch into the Mentava Basics curriculum. We save your progress on both pathways, so you can swap back to our standard curriculum whenever you want.