Over 1 in 4 children in the UK cannot read at the end of KS2, after years of Systematic, Synthetic Phonics, the way in which KS1 mainstream teachers have to teach children phonics. There has been an assumption, for over a decade, that this will lead, sequentially, to reading fluency.
This Word Recognition Intervention, FREE for parents (created by Miss Emma of The Reading Hut) has a focus on phonological decoding and recoding, and quicker mastery of orthographic knowledge - so that bridging processes and comprehension can take place (embracing The Active View of Reading)
Miss Emma has been supporting Aussie schools (for free) for years. This clip shows The Thomas Project created for a teacher in Brisbane in 2015, and the impact of using just one book! Within MAPPED there will soon be over 100, as the whole series Village with Three Corners series is being mapped.
The children start at Code Level Book 1 for consolidation of basic phonics (the correspondences tested in the Year 1 PSC) and just keep going. They have already had two years of Systematic, Synthetic Phonics in Key Stage One. This has not 'led to' 'fluent reading' for a huge number of children. Many have also 'switched off' and are no longer engaged or motivated to learn to read.
You can see how it works - they see the Code Mapped words, hear the sounds and see the graphemes (speech sound pics) and then have a go themselves!
This helps to overcome phonemic awareness deficits, and highlight the mapping of high frequency words (these make up the majority of words children read and write) Their word recognition skills improve quickly which makes it easier to focus on the other skills!
When they usually read at school so much working memory is usually being used to just figure out the words. Code Mapping changes that for them, and they can do it alone.
This is a unique approach - developed by Miss Emma (developer of The Speech Sound Pics (SSP) Approach in Australia) and puts to good use her Code Mapping Tool (available in the ICRWY Lessons app)
She loves the series, and has figured out a way to bridge the gap between phonological decoding using Code Level books, and self-teaching / phonological recording/ implicit learning using 'levelled' readers. They are able to transition into skilled readers, who use orthographic mapping. Orthographic mapping is now considered “the most current theory of how children form sight word representations” (Torgesen 2004b, p.36) “Orthographic mapping proposes that we use the pronunciations of words that are already stored in long-term memory as the anchoring points for the orthographic sequences (letters) used to represent those pronunciations.” Kilpatrick (2015) explains that for this to happen a student will need to be proficient in grapheme to phoneme knowledge and have advanced phonemic awareness.
Please see David Kilpatrick’s book, “Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties.”
Miss Emma argues that DfE Validated Systematic Synthetic Phonics programmes do not facilitate this quickly enough or adequately meet the learning needs of all children within the neurodiverse classroom.
