The method
Generate, validate, repair.
Never prompt a model and hope. That is the whole design, and everything below follows from it.
What happens to every sentence
Three steps, in this order, for every candidate story. The child sees the survivor and nothing else.
- 01
Generate, under the constraint
A human-written Recipe supplies the shape — a beginning, a turn, an ending. The generator fills it from a lexicon where every word carries its agreed segmentation, choosing only words inside this child’s sound set.
- 02
Validate, word by word
Every word is segmented into graphemes and checked against the set. Not sampled — every word, every time. A word we cannot resolve with certainty is a failure, not a guess: the gate fails closed.
- 03
Repair, or discard
A page with no telling that clears the gate takes the whole story down with it. It is binned silently and another is generated. The parent is never shown a failure they could read as their own fault.
The sound set is the one rigid thing.
Every book is built against an explicit grapheme–phoneme correspondence set: the sounds this particular child has been taught, in the order their program teaches them.
A parent sets it three ways — from a level they already know, from their school’s program, or from a sixty-second Sound Check we run.
Cumulative, sound by sound rather than stage by stage — a child part-way through a stage is the normal case, not an edge case.
The exceptions
Two, and both are visible
- Tricky words
- The high-frequency words every program teaches by sight at each stage. Permitted with a budget, and listed on the back of the book.
- The child’s own name
- Their name and the names in their Cast are always permitted, even before the sounds in them are taught — and are marked as such, so a parent understands why they are there.
- Nothing else
- There is no third exception, no “close enough”, and no setting that loosens the gate.
Structure comes from a person.
Narrative shape is not generated. Every story runs on a human-written Recipe, each page carrying several tellings ordered richest to simplest. The generator takes the richest one that clears the gate for this child — which is how a reader on six sounds gets a whole story rather than a caption book.
What this costs us
Speed and variety, sometimes. A story that cannot be told inside a child’s sound set does not get told. We would rather generate for another twenty seconds than hand a five-year-old a word that makes them feel like they can’t read.
See it hold
Every sample book lists its sound set on the cover. Every word inside is in that set, and you are welcome to go through one and find out.