A trilingual education

When James and his wife welcomed their daughter, Sarah, in the UK, they made a conscious effort to raise her trilingually. “We thought it'd be a real shame not to raise her to speak her mom’s language. And then when we were looking for a nanny, we decided to find one who speaks Spanish.”

Raising a trilingual child isn’t easy, especially since Sarah had an extra year before starting school in the UK due to her age cutoff. James was determined to make the most of this time: “We felt that because she was learning three languages, we needed to give her extra support to thrive.”

Sarah always loved stories: “She would sit and listen to us read to her for ages.” However, learning to read at age 3 is challenging for any child, so James and his wife agreed not to pressure Sarah. “If she wasn’t willing to practice herself, we were just going to stop and come back to it later. We didn't want learning to read to be something that she dreaded.”

Starting to accelerate

When Sarah began in June at age 3, she only knew alphabet names but not the letter sounds. “So she was having to do a little bit of deprogramming in that respect,” James noted. However, Sarah was determined to learn to read stories on her own. “We just made it a [habit] that every day after breakfast was dedicated for reading practice. The further she got through it the easier it became.”

Sarah spent several weeks to master left-right reading order, which “was pretty tough to get through.” But once she overcame the initial roadblocks, James watched her start accelerating. He recalled how “when she just started it was harder to see the progress she was making. But as she built up to words and reading a sentence I saw how the foundational knowledge was crucial.”

Within two months, Sarah was reading out shop names to her visiting grandparents, much to their surprise. “She actually decoded it [using letter sounds], and [her grandparents] were like, ‘WOW!’ They see Sarah every month, so they were pretty impressed with how quickly she was able to go from not reading at all to actually reading stuff out.”

“Once she started reading then she just would read everywhere - she wanted to read signs on the roads, reading shop names. So very quickly she started applying it outside of Mentava.”

Sarah wasn’t about to stop there. “By September she was reading pretty fluently. It was really impressive to see her decode a word on Monday, and by Tuesday she had instant [phonetic recall]. By October she was decoding words without sounding them out. It was the first time she’d ever see a word, and you could see her decoding it in her head and then saying the word out loud.”

Sarah completed our existing curriculum a few weeks ago, and by the end “she was flying through the stories, reading quicker than she was tapping. She had built to a level of fluency where she was just reading without any guidance.”

Transference of skills to French

Sarah turned 4 in September and just missed the cutoff to attend school in the UK, so James will homeschool her for the next year. She is now reading Oxford stage 2 and 3 books by herself.

He sees how “her peers have been in full-time education at expensive private schools, but can't read or decode words. The gap between their reading abilities is striking - it's quite sobering to see.”

Sarah’s approach to learning has also evolved. “Reading is an accepted part of her routine now. When she sees a book I’m reading that’s clearly above her level, she still picks out words to decode out of curiosity.”

James saw her skills in action when Sarah recently started reading French with ease. “There’s real transference of skills like blending and decoding. She reads French far ahead of where she should be, considering she’s had no formal education.”

How James’s way of thinking has shifted

After seeing Sarah’s progress with Mentava, James began rethinking his family’s approach to education. “Mentava has changed the way we think about education now. The typical private school tuition fees here are £20,000 a year. So if we spent $2,500 on Mentava, how else can we allocate that £20,000 (~$25,400) to the right tutor or app to accelerate progress where it matters?”

James expanded on this, explaining, “What would you pay to have your kid educated in six months? How much do you want to be led through the process versus doing it yourself? We were already exhausted from preparing lesson plans for French and math. So it was really helpful just to have a program to follow that’s very simple to sit down with my kid.”

“Previously, I wrote off education apps as time wasting, but Mentava has shown me it’s worth exploring the landscape. We considered homeschooling to be very stressful, but finding the right resources removes that burden,” James concluded.

Reflecting on their journey, James proudly shared, “Sarah can read now and she couldn’t when she started […] She’s learning French and also reading some Spanish. Six months ago, if you told us we'd be here, we wouldn't have believed you […] I’m really excited to get my son in front of the app.”