The Solution

The FUNetix 12 Hour Reading App is a "Wonderful, 12 Hour Flight to Literacy," that's "Free to ALL children."

FUNetix is a free app that will teach ANY child, ANYwhere, how to read, in about 12 hours, with minimal help required from an adult.

It would be, perhaps, presumptive of us to say that the FUNetix 12 Hour Reading App will solve the literacy crisis in America. But I personally, will say it. My name is Mr. R. Kali Woodward and I'm the Founding, Executive Director of The American Youth Literacy Foundation, dba FUNetix.

My background was as a Spanish and Arabic linguist for the 101st Airborne Division, Ft. Campbell, KY. I grew up studying and reading Hebrew. When my 8 year old son couldn't read and was going into second grade, I took him out of school and homeschooled him for a year to teach him how to read.

You could say that I "invented" FUNetix; but personally, I feel that I discovered it. I was the right person (the right "father") at the right time, with the right problem and the right background to see the connection that saved my son from illiteracy, or low literacy, and a life of incredible challenges and difficulty. I made a connection between what the Hebrew and Arabic languages had done 1,000 years ago to solve their "missing vowel" problem, and what my son was struggling with in English with its 75% missing vowels, uncertain letter patterns, unpredictable pronunciations, irregular spelling and the like.

I started the American Youth Literacy Foundation in 2008 to give FUNetix away to the world and to find a way to scale FUNetix to teach millions of children how to read and to save them from an illiterate or low literate life full of incredible challenges and difficulties.

It took us 9 years to get a patent on the FUNetix Reading Decoding System. We had to turn over a lot of stones. We had to distinguish ourselves from ALL of the prior reading curricula, including ALL other phonics-based curricula that had EVER been invented and used in the United States and the world; and we had to show why FUNetix was different, why it was a new concept, a novel idea, a non-obvious combination of a solution that had worked for other languages, but that had never been thought of and successfully applied to English. (You can read about the uniqueness of FUNetix here, in the "Why It Works" section.)

After 17 years of curriculum development, refinement and iteration, and after employing hundreds of tutors to teach thousands of children from all socio-economic and cultural backgrounds (including ESL students) across the country, how to read, and after seeing thousands of children learn the basic principles of reading and get through, what we call, the "Blending Breakthrough," in 4 hours or less, and go on to read grade level books, with and without diacritics, in 12 hours or less, and, all the while, knowing, that this is how I learned to read Hebrew, and knowing that this is how I learned to read Arabic, and knowing that millions of Hebrew and Arabic and Farsi speaking children around the world have been learning to read with diacritics for thousands of years, and knowing that my own son learned how to read in 6 weeks, and went back to school and became a reader, just like every other student, and seeing him develop and go on to study engineering in college until COVID-19 struck; after having seen all this, and done all this, and learned all this, I am personally able to say that I believe that the FUNetix Reading App is capable of teaching your child how to read in 12 hours or less, and that it's capable of teaching millions of children how to read, with minimal adult help or supervision, via a 2,000 screen, fully narrated, 40 module, gamified learning experience!

I cannot say if teaching millions of children how to read in 12 hours will solve the literacy crisis in America, but I can say that it solved my family's personal literacy crisis, and that it will likely solve your family's and millions of other families' personal "literacy crises" as well.

And one day, we will all look back, and we will all know whether the FUNetix 12 Hour Reading App solved the literacy crisis in America.