As a teacher, I have found that many reading schemes claiming to support the synthetic phonics programme, often involve children in parallel activities such as whole word reading or working with rhyme and onset or even worse, guessing by looking at pictures. Scientific studies have shown that children learn best when they first understand that writing is nothing more than a representation of the sounds of speech - letters are used to represent sounds and reading schemes work best when they adhere completely to this principle.
I have written this progressive series of books to enable children to learn to read by reading with an adult.
Each book introduces a new sound and its corresponding letter. Children read along with an adult and each time the new sound (highlighted in red) is reached, the child says the sound whilst the adult continues to read the rest of the word. The child learns a new sound with each book and as more sounds are learned begins to blend those sounds together to read whole words.
Whole words are first encountered in book 3, where new sounds are written in red and previously learned sounds in blue. Where all the sounds in a word have been learned, the word is shown as a word card, signifying that the child can blend the sounds to read the word. Working with an adult ensures that any misconceptions are dealt with immediately and also allows children to progress more quickly if they start to notice and work out some sounds for themselves.
This reading scheme follows the National Curriculum for England and Wales Letters and Sounds synthetic phonics scheme for teaching reading. Children learn to read by learning the sound letter correspondence (phoneme/grapheme correspondence) and start with the letters S, A, T and P.
As children progress through the series, they learn alternative sounds that letters may represent and sounds represented by two letters together e.g. ch.
