Funny brilliant stories, customize names, etc! Created by Harvard PhD professor

Welcome to The Reading Club. The purpose of this app is to help you make time for a magical shared reading experience with your young and emerging reader — an experience you both will want to return to again and again.

The magic is in the stories, which are deeply creative, beautifully illustrated, and ticklishly funny. The stories are created by gifted storytellers who are also parents of young children AND university professors holding PhDs from universities, including Harvard University and the University of Toronto. Dr. Alexis Diamond (PhD, Harvard), co-founder of The Reading Club and creator of most of the stories, is a professor of Computational Science at Minerva University in San Francisco. Dr. Diamond’s academic work has been cited more than 10,000 times, including most recently in 2023 by NobelPrize.org, in its publication of Dr. Guido Imbens's 2021 Economics Nobel Prize Lecture.

Reading Club stories embed scholarly and academic themes and concepts in math, science, philosophy, and other subjects, and widely accepted human values and aspirations for social life, such as the importance of care, justice, equality, dignity, love, resilience, & respect.

Without compromising fun or readability, our stories raise questions about what these concepts and principles mean given the decisions we make. We know these lofty aspirations may be too much to cover in a simple app, but we’re giving it a shot.

The magic of our stories extends to their customizability. Before starting a story, our readers can customize it (if they wish) by selecting characters' names, genders, pronouns, and locations. Allowing readers to shape their own stories makes them exceptionally engaging.

Our stories were designed to facilitate what is known in academic literature as "shared reading": when emerging readers read a book with support and encouragement of established readers, usually reading together side-by-side. Our founders know from personal experience that shared reading can be a powerful way to strengthen emotional and social bonds with young children. Of course, the Reading Club can also be used by children reading on their own, as well as by students of any age who simply wish to improve their reading skills (including students of English as a Second Language).

Features include the ability to tap a word to hear its pronunciation and a Word Bank where challenging words can be saved for future practice. Readers can also set reminders for regular reading times and reading difficulty levels. There is even an "Analytics" option that will email readers a custom spreadsheet summarizing results metrics such as ‘number of words read’ and ‘number of pages per minute’.

Our small team is also working on gamification to enhance young reader engagement. At the moment, once the child reads a chapter they qualify for membership in the Club and can get a printable certificate. Our development team is working on enhancements that will soon allow members to qualify for badges and other forms of recognition for their reading achievements.

We hope that you find our app promotes positive, helpful, and engaging times with the emerging readers in your life. Feedback (including feature requests!) is always welcomed at: [email protected].