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Sample our offerings below or contact us for a full product demo.

  • Reading Ignition starts students off with our Level Placement, so that we know where to target students’ advanced-literacy instruction and practice. They then embark on a love-based-learning journey.

  • For many students, reading instruction ends in elementary school. But this is often not enough. Most middle and high schoolers need guidance on what to do while they read to get to comprehension. Reading Ignition makes these practices, conscious-reading strategies, which strong readers do automatically and unconsciously, visible and explicit, so that ALL students can reach reading success.

Preview Lift Off

  • Empower students to discover the texts they’ll love to read. Teachers customize the four-week workload, and students embark on a reading journey where they’re in control. After completing Lift Off, students unlock personalized book recommendations to grow their libraries.

  • Lift Off automatically serves each student a diverse array of texts and activities at the right level. Zinc accommodates readers at all abilities from fourth grade through college.

Explore Vocabulary

  • Students learn and practice vocabulary words using four modes of gameplay: image, definition, sentence, and synonym. They have a love-based-learning experience.

  • Zinc offers vocabulary in-context accompanying our articles, and we have stand-alone vocabulary sets that use spaced repetition. With our spaced repetition, students see each new work SIX times over about eight weeks. With this approach, students retain new words, moving them into their long-term nonprocedural memory.

Browse Articles

  • Each article and its accompanying comprehension quiz is aligned to specific state standards and reading skills, so that teachers can target students’ practice in the areas they need. In addition, Zinc has article sets to accompany curricula, like HMH and EngageNY, and to complement commonly-taught texts, topics, and themes.

  • Zinc’s “Articles” section is made up of 90% nonfiction texts and 10% fiction excerpts and poetry. Of the nonfiction, we only use authentic texts. Our content team scours the web to cherry pick articles that have the potential to turn adolescents on to reading. We don’t pander or condescend to students, and we only choose content that we adults would want to read ourselves. This is how we create a love-based-learning experience for them.

Check Out Close Reading

  • A top recommendation for improving adolescent literacy is to “provide direct and explicit comprehension strategy instruction,” so that’s what we do in Zinc. Our Close-Reading Experiences teach students what to do while they’re reading and give them time to practice their new conscious-reading skills.

  • Our Close Reading Experiences provide instruction tailored to students of various reading levels, from 4th grade up to college. And we use diverse texts, from commonly-taught plays and novels to speeches. The diversity of our texts fosters choice, autonomy, and love-based learning.

Sample a Test Prep Lesson

  • Matt Bardin founded Zinc Learning Labs after working in the tutoring and test-prep industry for over 25 years. He used insights from his time working with students one-on-one to develop Zinc, an online tool that can deliver higher test scores quickly and with a love-based-learning approach.

  • Zinc is focused on raising students’ reading levels — the key to improving their standardized test scores. But to get even better results, we also teach students how to take such exams. In addition to our dedicated Test Prep Close Reading Experiences, we embed test-prep strategies throughout the program. With repeated exposure, students pick up these habits and use them on high-stakes assessments.

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