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Ember Resources

Ember supercharges reading growth by extending learning beyond one-on-one tutoring sessions with up to 10 minutes of personalized, independent daily practice.

If you have any questions or feedback, please visit and complete the Support Form on Ignite Reading’s Knowledge Base (select “Ember Support”) and our Technology Support Team will be in touch with you!

About Ember

  • What is Ember?
      • Ember supercharges reading growth by extending instruction beyond tutoring sessions with up to 10 minutes of personalized, independent practice each day. Students work with Ember for 1-5 minutes in the waiting room before their tutoring session and can continue for another 5 minutes post-session. Ember focuses on building oral reading fluency through targeted reinforcement activities.
  • What does Ember “Early Access” mean?
    • In Fall 2025, we piloted Ember with 5 districts, 55 schools and over 1200 students. Now, we are providing "early access" to Ember for all our participating schools in service of maximizing student reading growth while gathering valuable feedback from our school partners to continuously improve the platform.

Ember Activities

Word Decoder

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For students at the ULS level and above, Ember presents a personalized mix of mastered and newly taught high-frequency words. Students read the various words aloud and Ember evaluates their pronunciation. 
  • High Frequency Words
        • Students revisit mastered High Frequency Words to ensure routine exposure and scaffolding of these high-priority words informing overall fluency ability. 
        • Mastered words are reinforced to build automaticity and reading speed.
        • Newly taught words are introduced per cycle for additional practice beyond tutoring as needed.
        • Students who have limited or no mastered HFWs will engage with practice words aligned to their gaps from tutoring lessons (skill gap words).
  • Skill Gap Words
      • When students have exhausted their HFW lists, Ember serves personalized skill gap words—words specifically chosen to target phonics patterns where the student needs additional practice, based on their assessment data from various formal and informal components from tutoring and other assessments.
      • When a student masters all their HFWs, Ember will also prioritize skill gap words after the student practices with one mastered HFW for initial confidence building / review.

Word Transformer

word transformer

  • Word Transformer is our newest Ember activity currently focused on supporting phonemic awareness and phonics alongside Word Decoding. 
  • Students in ULS and beyond will alternate between Word Decoding and Word Transformer between sessions. 
  • In Word Transformer, students practice modifying words by changing one sound (phoneme) at a time—for example, “cat” to “bat” to “bit.” This strengthens phonemic awareness and decoding skills.
  • Word Transformer will be personalized to target specific phoneme-grapheme patterns each student needs.

Pop the Letters

pop letters

  • Students in the BAK (Basic Alphabet Knowledge) protocol engage with Pop the Letters—an interactive letter identification game that builds foundational alphabetic knowledge. Students are provided with target phonemes (letter sounds) and are required to identify the appropriate grapheme (letter) that corresponds based on its most common pronunciation. 

Videos

Introducing Ember


Ember Implementation Video


Resources

FAQs

Download the FAQs as a PDF here.

Student Experience

  • Who is eligible for Ember?
    • All Ignite Reading students are eligible for Ember.
  • Will Ember impact my students’ time in their Ignite Reading tutoring session?
    • No, students’ Ignite Reading tutoring sessions will remain at 15 minutes daily.
  • When can students engage in Ember?
    • Students can engage in Ember 1-5 minutes prior to their tutoring block, with the opportunity to continue the learning 5 minutes post-tutoring as well. If a student logs in less than 1 minute prior to tutoring, they will be taken directly to their tutoring session.
  • When will newly added students be able to access Ember?
    • New students can start using Ember right away.
  • How will Ember change the trajectory of how students will move through the program?
    • Our data suggests that it will accelerate their growth. In our Fall 2025 pilot, students with 3 minutes in Ember practiced over 5 words per session and mastered 10% more high-frequency words.
  • Does Ember leverage AI technology?
    • All Ember content and curriculum are human-designed by our reading specialists and grounded in the science of reading.
    • Ember does NOT use:
      • Generative AI or large language models (like ChatGPT)
      • AI-generated instructional content
      • Chatbots or conversational AI interacting with students
    • Ember does use:
      • Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is an AI-assisted technology that listens to students read aloud and analyzes their pronunciation at the phoneme level, helping us identify which sounds and skills they’ve mastered.

Data

  • What data is Ignite Reading capturing through Ember?
    • Ignite Reading captures data on student attendance, engagement and mastery. 
  • Will there be additional data reports to support Ember?
    • Your Literacy Success Partner (LSP) will share Ember data with you as part of your Student Impact Updates. We are also working to incorporate Ember data in Ignite Reading’s School Portal later in the year – stay tuned!
  • How will I know which students are engaging in Ember?
    • Your Literacy Success Partner (LSP) will share Ember data with you as part of your Student Impact Updates, which will include Ember usage data. We are also working to incorporate Ember data in Ignite Reading’s School Portal later in the year – stay tuned!

Set-Up

  • Is there additional technology set-up required for Ember?
    • Good news—you've already done most of the setup by hosting Ignite Reading! Just ensure:
      • Headsets on, volume up and microphones unobstructed (students need to hear and speak to Ember)
      • Pop-ups are allowed from https://students.ignite-reading.com to enable automatic transition to tutoring sessions (otherwise your students will have to manually press a button to transition)
      • Product Analytics tracking is allowed from https://heapanalytics.com to enable  Ignite Reading to research the user experience and improve the product