Academics
ReadRise
Rise into reading with Sonny the lark — syllable-chunking, word parts, vocabulary, comprehension, and read-it-with-feeling fluency, all read aloud, for grade 3 (ages 8–9).
▶ Play it nowBuilt for sittings of about 15 minutes on the screen. That is our design budget, not a measurement.
Meet your mentor
Every Spark & Anvil app has a friendly mentor character that demonstrates, asks, and patiently scaffolds learning. On-device AI personalizes the mentor's responses to your kid's progress — never connecting to a server, never collecting data.
Mentored by Marley
#E86A4C Characters who teach
Meet the cast
ReadRise is a reading app for ages 8 to 9, the year children move from learning to read to reading to learn. Sonny the lark reads aloud smoothly and with feeling, Chunk the chipmunk claps long words into syllables, Morpho the butterfly opens words into their parts, Verba the parrot figures out new words from the words around them, Gist the owl finds the big idea, and Vera the cat reads between the lines. Marley the badger is the mentor who keeps the Reading Den safe.
Sonny
Fluency + prosody — a small warm-gold lark who reads aloud smooth and with feeling, letting sentences rise and fall like a song; the music of reading IS fluency, never speed
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Chunk
Multisyllabic decoding — a happy chipmunk with full cheeks who claps a long word into syllable beats and cracks it open one bite at a time (ed-u-ca-tion)
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Morpho
Morphology — a butterfly who opens a word like wings into its parts (un + happy + ness) and builds new words from prefix, root, and suffix
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Verba
Vocabulary — a rainbow parrot with a word-satchel who catches a new word's meaning from its neighbors and its parts, then collects it
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Gist
Comprehension (informational) — a golden owl who finds the one big idea a whole page is about and the key details that hold it up, always with text evidence
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Vera
Inference + figurative (literary) — a clever cat who reads what a story shows but doesn't say, and untangles what a phrase really means, from clues in the text
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Marley
Mentor — a broad, calm badger who keeps the Reading Den; frames each skill as safe, offers read-aloud always, and treats a stumble like a sneeze — normal, never a failure
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Browse all chapters → · What's distributed-narrative methodology? →
What's inside
Learning goal
Rise into reading with Sonny the lark — syllable-chunking, word parts, vocabulary, comprehension, and read-it-with-feeling fluency, all read aloud, for grade 3 (ages 8–9).
Question kits
11 curriculum-aligned question kits, 220 questions in all, mapped to recognized standards.
On-device AI mentor
FoundationModels-powered hints, feedback, and adaptive difficulty — all running locally.
Mentored by Marley — on-device AI, no data leaves the device.
How ReadRise handles your kid's data
- ✅ All progress, settings, and AI-generated content stays on the device
- ✅ No analytics, no tracking, no third-party SDKs
- ✅ Free — no ads, no in-app purchases
- ✅ No personal information collected from children — in line with COPPA (updated by the 2026 FTC amendments)
- ✅ No chat with strangers — play-together rooms use a short code and preset emotes, never typed messages
ReadRise runs on ForgeKit — the open-source Swift Package Manager framework that powers every Spark & Anvil app. ForgeKit ensures consistent accessibility, COPPA compliance, and design language across the portfolio, so your kid's progress and preferences feel coherent across every app they touch.
Coming to the App Store
ReadRise is in active development. Email us to hear when it ships — no marketing, no spam, just a one-shot launch announcement.
Email me at launch