Avery plays with the Speech Sound Monsters

I’m going to send a teeny tot (2) some ICRWY lessons - to facilitate phonemic awareness and orthographic learning - I asked anyone in the Facebook.com/groups/orthographicmapping if interested in seeing how he gets on.

The most effective way I have found, to teach 2 and 3 year olds to read, looks very different to how I teach a whole class of 5 year olds. It’s not explicit, systematic phonics! I don’t take them through the 4 SSP code levels and ‘decodable readers’ - because their ‘reading’ brains learn differently at 2 and 3.

As far as I know none of the research around learning to read (other than if hyperlexic) has even touched on toddlers. But toddlers wouldn’t learn to read with explicit synthetic phonics instruction as far too many concepts and it’s too far removed from what’s engaging to them.

Perhaps it’s a good way to show the differences between ‘phonics’ and what I do - developing orthographic knowledge.

I can teach 2 and 3 year olds myself relatively easily - as I do it while they play, and because I work out what makes them tick. I wonder if I can do this when the toddler is on the other side of the world, so no ‘face to face’ teaching. Avery is in Australia! I am in the UK...

I’m so worried about how kids are being taught in UK schools (synthetic phonics) that although I likely won’t ever see the long term impact of improving the literacy lives of toddlers, I’m thinking it’s a worthy goal.

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Miss Emma X