Thank you Innovate UK! You’ve funded word mapping technology that means this little one will learn to read by seeing how speech maps to print. We simply show the code. He bypasses being taught phonics explicitly through a programme. We’re now tracking huge numbers of 3 and 4 year olds learning this way. Many parents started as older siblings had struggled with phonics and spelling in school.

We’ll follow Amari, who has just turned three, as he learns to read with fluency and comprehension well before starting school. The videos offer full transparency, not just a 'before and after' or heavy editing to fit a narrative.

He also has hard copy versions of The Village with Three Corners. In this story he meets the naughty Percy Green! We’re focusing on rich oral language, vocabulary, story, and meaning, alongside helping children SEE how words work.

This is also what we do with children who’ve struggled with synthetic phonics programmes.

A trained TA can do this separately for just ten minutes a day, while also supporting the underlying phonemic awareness and working memory difficulties many of these children experience. I have a pilot on hold due to health issues but keen to start when I get the all-clear from the docs!

We’re connecting word mapping with language and oracy from the very beginning, so children build meaning, vocabulary, speech, reading, and spelling together.

We also start training tutors to do this from June 1 and join a bank of Experts at Hand, because this is proving to be a powerful intervention for children with EHCPs. We’ve already seen this with Alf, who is autistic and is now reading the Main Readers. Speech Sound Mapping was added to his EHCP after two years of being unable to decode ‘pat’ using Read Write Inc. We hope this approach will also be included within the newly announced Individual Support Plans (ISPs).

It’s a new era for reading and spelling. MySpeekie is also used as a one-screen AAC! 

#ShowTheCode #SpeechSoundMapping #MyWordz #EarlyReading #EdTech #InnovateUK