About Radical Reading

Reading isn’t a subject.
It’s a life trajectory.

Almost every child can do more than get by. They can truly master reading, and carry that confidence into everything after. That's the whole mission.

The Matthew Effect

Why early reading changes everything.

Few choices pay higher returns for your child’s future.

Small skills stack into reading, and reading turns into something else entirely. A child who reads with ease starts asking better questions. They go looking — and come back with sharks, or Rome, or how a bridge stays up. Nobody assigned it.

That's the part that lasts: the appetite. A child who believes they can understand anything keeps reaching, long after anyone's checking. Reading doesn't decide what they'll choose. It decides how much they get to choose.

It starts with words. It ends with the world.

The classroom reading challenge

Imagine 25 kids learning piano in one classroom.

Ontario schools finally teach reading the right way. But no teacher can sit beside each child while they master it.

Reading is one of the most complex skills a person learns — closer to piano than to spelling. Most subjects survive on the basics. Reading doesn't. It needs someone beside you, catching what you can't hear yourself.

Ask any teacher: we all want to reach every child. But one adult and 25 kids is just tough math.

Reading is taught in school, but mastered at home.

Hi, I’m Lark

I’ve spent over twenty years in special education — and I’m also the mom of a son with dyslexia. So I’ve sat on both sides of the IEP table: the expert side, and the up-at-night, is-my-kid-okay side.

For nearly a decade I worked to fix reading instruction from the inside — as president of Decoding Dyslexia Ontario, consulting on the province's Right to Read inquiry, and then with the Education Ministry, helping write the curriculum. We won changes I'm proud of. I also learned a powerful lesson:

System change takes years. Childhood happens now.

I built Radical Reading so your child doesn't have to wait: the program schools use, with a real expert on the line, at home today. I called it Radical because insisting every child can reach mastery still counts as a radical idea. It shouldn't.

The Record

Lark helped bring in Ontario’s new reading curriculum.