Like many educators across the state, Winterset Elementary School teacher Abby Bean has the challenging task of strengthening literacy skills for 22 lively young minds, each with varying skill levels, interests and talents. But, she is up to the task, providing engaging literacy instruction in her third grade classroom and incorporating innovative, evidence-based resources, such as the state-sponsored Reading Assistant tool, better known as Amira.
Bean, currently in her ninth year of teaching, and her fellow third grade teachers at Winterset took an interest in using Amira when it was first offered last year. With this personalized reading tutor that supports foundational literacy skills such as phonemic awareness, phonics, decoding, vocabulary and comprehension, her students can receive real-time reading attention and instruction, even when working independently.
“Amira was super helpful for accountability when they are reading and working on their own,” Bean said. “If they come across a word they don’t know, they can’t just skip over it. They have to take the time to break the word apart and sound the word out. They receive immediate corrective feedback.”
In 2024, the Iowa Department of Education invested $3 million to offer licenses for Amira to Iowa public and accredited nonpublic schools at no cost. Through this initial investment, 200,000 licenses were issued to 246 schools across the state. An estimated 105,000 elementary students received access to the Amira reading tool.
“It is impressive to see the impact that Amira has made on student literacy skills over the past year,” said April Gosselink-Lemke, Department literacy education program consultant. “With Amira, we have seen approximately 960,000 stories read and just shy of 4 million minutes of reading in total with Iowa students.”
Amira is an evidence-based tool, grounded in the Science of Reading. It uses advanced voice recognition technology to provide tutoring to students as they read aloud and uses a digital avatar to provide friendly assistance to young students. Typically, students use Amira 20-30 minutes per week. Teachers can view a recording of the student’s work in Amira to review and modify instruction scores and to see which areas a student is excelling in or needs more attention. Growth for each student is assessed at the beginning, middle and end of the year.
For Winterset Elementary, Amira offers a new way they can support their teachers and enhance classroom instruction. It also provides easy-to-use progress reports to track growth and make adjustments as they continue moving forward.
“Winterset decided to use (Amira) because the tool supports instruction and gives us clear diagnostic information,” said Michelle Macumber, PK-12 core curriculum instructional coach for literacy at Winterset Community Schools. “It provides explicit reading practice, and teachers can actually listen back to every student session, which is incredibly helpful. Students can work independently in the program while teachers focus on small-group instructions, helping us make the most of our classroom time.”
Although Amira is often used with students who need extra support to build literacy skills, it is a tool that can be used with any elementary student. In fact, in Bean’s classroom, she uses it with the entire class, no matter the skill level.
“Everyone uses Amira in my class,” she said. “For my kids who are reading at a higher level, it is helpful as they read nonfiction text and challenge themselves to read larger, more advanced words. They weren’t necessarily used to that, so it is definitely helping them grow.”
In a short amount of time, Bean has seen the benefits of using Amira with her students, providing efficiencies for her time and more support for her class.
“I love that students are required to read a word and sound it out, keeping them accountable,” Bean said. “The progress monitoring reports show what skills they are missing and provide a whole class view, too. It shows what we need to go back on or what letter or word we need to work on. It’s been a helpful resource.”
With strong results and feedback reported from classrooms like Bean’s, Iowa is continuing its support of Amira for schools across the state. Recently, Governor Kim Reynolds and the Department announced expanded access to Amira for the 2025-26 school year. The Department is providing $400,000 in Amira licenses for students who need extra support as defined by the Multi-Tiered Systems of Support’s Tier II and Tier III. Students who are English Learners can now also access the Amira reading tutor. Additionally, Governor Reynolds has invested $2.5 million to expand access to Amira for Tier I students statewide. Iowa schools can sign up for the new round of Amira licenses through December 2026.
Bean encourages other Iowa schools to consider using Amira licenses and take a look at how Amira can help their elementary classrooms and support teachers with evidence-based personalized reading instruction for students.
“Just get started,” she said. “Amira levels students as they read and matches their skills to the program. We have enjoyed it as a team at Winterset. We have gotten a lot of use out of it.”