Help

Students in Classes 5 to 12, anywhere in India. A parent or guardian signs up with the child, approves the account by email, and gets their own view of the child’s reading.

Go to Create account and fill in the student’s name, a username, their class, their city, a password, and the parent or guardian’s name, email and mobile number.

The student can fill this in themselves, but the parent’s email must be real and must be the parent’s own — the next step depends on it.

Pick the class carefully. It decides how strictly the student’s written summaries are marked, and once the parent approves the account it cannot be changed from inside the app. A confirmation box asks you to check it the moment you choose it.

Indian law (the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023) requires a parent or guardian’s verifiable consent before a child’s data is processed. So after sign-up the account is pending: the student cannot sign in yet.

We email the parent a link. The email shows the student’s name, username and class so the parent can check them before approving. Clicking Give Consent & Activate Account switches the account on.

The link works for 7 days. If nobody clicks it in that time, the account and everything entered at sign-up are deleted automatically. Just sign up again if that happens.

Check the spam or promotions folder first — it comes from support@shapeofheadline.com. Give it a few minutes; mail is sometimes slow.

If it is still missing, the email address may have been typed wrong at sign-up. Write to us from the parent’s correct address with the student’s username and we will fix it and resend.

On the page that opens after you click the consent link, you are offered a box to set a password. Your login name is the email address the consent was sent to. That’s it — you now have a parent account.

If you skipped that step, we email you a separate “Set your parent password” link; or open the consent link again and the password box is still there.

One parent login covers every child registered with the same parent email. If you have two children on Shape of Headline, sign up each of them with the same email and you’ll see both from one dashboard.

There is one sign-in page for everyone.

Students sign in with their username (the one chosen at sign-up) and password. Students do not have an email on the platform.

Parents sign in with their email address and the password they set.

You are signed out automatically after two hours without any activity. Just sign in again.

No. Shape of Headline runs in the browser on any phone, tablet or laptop. There is no app to install and nothing to update.

Every day there is a small set of short, real news pieces — the shelf. Each piece is rewritten to be finished in a few minutes and is checked against its source before it appears. Every student sees the same shelf, whatever their class; the class only changes how the summary is marked.

A fresh shelf is published every morning by 6 am, Monday to Sunday.

You don’t have to read all of them. Pick what looks interesting. One piece read and understood is a full day.

Once a day, a clock of 45 minutes runs. It starts the moment the student opens their first piece of the day — not when they sign in, and not when they look at the shelf. Signing in to check the calendar costs nothing.

Inside the 45 minutes a student can read and submit as many pieces as they like. When the clock runs out, reading and submitting are closed for the day, and the clock starts fresh with the first piece opened the next day.

The clock is kept on our server. Leaving a tab open, or changing the countdown on the screen, does not extend it.

Why a clock at all? Because a daily habit is the point. Fifteen minutes of real attention, every day, does more than an hour once a week.

You can open and re-read anything you already worked on from the calendar, but you cannot submit a summary for a piece from an earlier day. Each day’s shelf closes at midnight. What you didn’t read stays unread; a new shelf is up by 6 am the next morning.

On the reading page there is a Word meaning box. Type the word and press Get meaning. You get a short, student-friendly explanation, and the word is added to your personal vocabulary list, which you can open any time from your dashboard.

Looking words up is encouraged and does not affect your marking.

A few sentences, in your own words, saying what the piece was about. Not a copy of the article and not just the headline reworded. Imagine telling a friend who hasn’t read it what happened and why it matters.

What counts as “enough” depends on your class:

Every summary gets one of three results, with a sentence explaining why:

When the checker is unsure, it leans towards the gentler result — Almost rather than Not yet. It never marks you down for spelling or grammar; it looks at whether you understood.

After an Understood summary, you are asked one short question that can only be answered by someone who read the body of the piece, not just the headline. Answer it correctly and the read is verified: it counts on your calendar, it counts towards your streak, and your parent sees it as understood.

Get it wrong and you can try again. Nothing is verified until the answer is right.

This is the anti-cheat step. Pasting the article back, or a summary written by someone else, usually comes apart here.

Five summary attempts per piece, and twenty per day across all pieces. Both reset the next day. A piece that has been verified cannot be submitted again — one verified read per piece, per student.

If you hit five on one piece, pick another. A fresh piece will teach you more than a sixth go at the same one.

Because copying isn’t understanding. A summary copied word-for-word from the piece is marked Not yet, however accurate it is. Close the piece, think about what it said, and write it the way you would say it.

The streak is the number of school days in a row on which you read and understood at least one piece. A day counts only when a read is verified — summary marked Understood and the follow-up answered correctly. Opening a piece, or getting Almost, does not count.

Reading three pieces in one day is great, but it is still one day. Only the first verified read of the day moves the streak.

Missed days are counted Monday to Saturday. Sunday is a rest day: skipping it never breaks anything, so a streak that ends on Saturday and continues on Monday is unbroken. Reading on a Sunday is optional, and if you do, it adds a day like any other.

The streak does not reset to zero. Each missed school day (Monday to Saturday) costs 2 days off the streak. The penalty is applied the next time you complete a verified read, and that read then adds its own +1. The streak never goes below 0.

So a streak of 10 survives one missed day, dented; it takes a full week away to lose it completely. A long run is worth protecting, and one bad day is not the end of it.

No. Sunday is not a school day, so nothing was missed. Saturday → Monday is treated as consecutive.

There is a shelf on Sunday too, and reading is entirely optional. If you do read and get verified on a Sunday, it counts: the day goes green on the calendar and the streak goes up by one, just like any other day. Sunday is the one day where skipping costs nothing and reading still pays.

The number on the dashboard is the streak as of your last verified read. The greeting looks at whether you read yesterday (or Saturday, on a Monday): if you didn’t, it warns you that the next read will apply the penalty. The drop itself only happens when you complete that read, exactly as in the table above.

The longest streak you have ever reached. It never goes down, even when the current streak does. It is kept through the free trial, through a lapse, and through paying — nothing about your history is ever erased.

Green days are clickable: tap one to see what you read and wrote that day. Use the arrows to look back up to a year.

Only a verified read colours a day green. A day where you tried but didn’t reach Understood shows red on the student calendar — the parent calendar shows it differently, see below.

An amber day is worth a conversation, not a scolding: your child sat down and tried. Click the day to read what they wrote and see the checker’s reason — often it is one missing detail.

Today shows amber the moment a summary is submitted and turns green when a read is verified, so you can watch it change during the day.

Days before the account was created are never coloured, and never counted as missed. If the whole month is before the join date, a caption says so.

For each child: current and best streak, the ten most recent school days as a row of dots (filled = a verified read), the month calendar above, and a list of recent reading — each piece with its headline and a badge: Understood if verified, Not yet if not.

Click any coloured day and you see exactly what your child read that day, the summary they wrote, the checker’s reason, and the follow-up question with their answer. Nothing is summarised for you; you see the actual writing.

Parents cannot read or submit pieces themselves, and cannot edit anything the child wrote.

No. Register each child with the same parent email. One parent login shows all of them, with a switch between children on the dashboard.

Not at the moment. The dashboard is the record; open it whenever you like. You will receive email only for account matters: the consent request, your password link, a password reset for your child, and payment confirmation.

Click Forgot password on the sign-in page and enter the student’s username. The reset link is sent to the parent’s email, because students have no email on the platform — and because a child shouldn’t be able to reset their own account without a parent knowing.

The link works once and expires after 60 minutes. Setting a new password does not sign anyone in; go to the sign-in page afterwards.

Same Forgot password link; enter your email. The reset link comes to that address, works once, and expires after 60 minutes. For safety the page gives the same reply whether or not the email is registered.

If you never set a parent password in the first place, use the link in your “Set your parent password” email, or open the original consent link again.

Ignore it. Nothing changes unless someone opens the link and sets a new password, and the link expires by itself. If it keeps happening, write to us.

After two hours without any activity, the session ends. Sign in again; nothing is lost. The 45-minute reading clock, if it was running, keeps running on the server regardless.

Write to support@shapeofheadline.com from the parent’s registered email. We delete the student’s account and all associated data. See the Privacy Policy for what is kept and for how long.

15 days, counted from the day the parent approves the account — not from sign-up, so waiting for the consent email costs nothing. Everything is included; there is no reduced version.

There is no countdown nagging from day one. A quiet reminder appears inside the app in the last three days.

₹200 a month, paid once a term: ₹600 for 3 months. One price for every class, no extras.

From the parent dashboard, press Pay. The page shows the amount and a short payment reference. On a phone, tap the button and your UPI app (GPay, PhonePe, Paytm, any of them) opens with the amount filled in. On a laptop, scan the QR code with a UPI app. Please keep the reference in the payment note.

That is all you need to do. When the payment reaches us we extend the child’s access by 3 months and email you — usually within a few hours, occasionally the next morning. There is no “I have paid” button to press.

No. Paid months are added to the end of whatever access you already have. Pay on day 10 of a 15-day trial and the term starts on day 16. Pay after a lapse and the term starts from the day of payment.

Nothing is deleted. When access lapses the student sees a “reading is paused” page instead of the shelf; the calendar, streak, best streak and vocabulary list are all kept exactly as they were. Pay, and reading resumes where it left off.

One honest note: the streak counts school days, so days spent lapsed do count as missed when the next read happens. The best streak is untouched.

If you are unhappy in the first two weeks of a paid period, write to us from the parent’s email and we will refund it. After that we do not refund part-used periods, but there is nothing to cancel — there is no automatic renewal and no card on file, so nothing is charged without a fresh payment from you. This matches section 4 of the Terms of Use.

Name, class, username and city; the summaries they write and the results; the words they look up; and the parent’s name, email and mobile for consent and the parent view. The consent record also stores the internet address and time of approval, as the law requires. Nothing is sold, and there is no advertising. Full details are in the Privacy Policy.

There is no chat, no comments, no messaging, no profiles visible to other students, no feed and no links out to the open internet. A student sees the day’s pieces, their own writing, and their own progress. The pieces are written and checked by us before they appear.

An AI checker, following a fixed rubric for each class band (shown above under What do I write). It reads the piece and the summary together and decides whether the summary shows understanding. It does not fact-check the world, only whether the summary matches the piece, and it is told to lean gentle when unsure. Your child’s writing is not used to train anything.

If a result looks plainly wrong, write to us with the date and the piece — we read every such message and adjust the rubric when it is at fault.