Guest post from James Lyra Recently on the various Dyslexia Support pages, there have been many questions about ‘decodable’ books. Here is my take on the topic. Technically, every written word in the English language is decodable, because every written word is a symbolic representation of the spoken word i.e. letters are symbols (created by us… Continue reading Decodable readers, systematicity and practice

  Nonsense words are, by definition, words a child will never have seen before. Because children won’t have been exposed to them, they won’t be able to use their visual memories to read them. As a matter of fact, educational psychologists have long been aware of this and have used nonsense words as part of… Continue reading Why we should be using but not teaching nonsense words

Phonics offers everyone, from the child beginning to learn to read and write from the moment they enter school to the most experienced reader, a clear and simple strategy for reading and spelling every word in the English language. Although most people accept that phonics is a very effective way of teaching young children to… Continue reading Phonics for all

  David and I first met almost twenty years ago, by which time, he’d been working as an educational psychologist for Wigan Council for more than twenty years. What brought us together was our mutual commitment to teaching children to read. During his career, David realised that the problem behind many of the things that… Continue reading In memory of Dave Philpot, co-founder of Sounds-Write

Although I’ve been asked this question a number of times in the past, today I was confronted with it again. The question was: ‘What should I do about my boy? He hates writing.’ So, assuming that the boy wasn’t given some kind of emotional or physical shock when he first picked up a pencil, there are… Continue reading What to do about the boy who hates writing

At Sounds-Write, we always begin each section of our teaching programme with word building? There are three main reasons: First, we are teaching children that spellings stand for sounds in the language – our threshold concept. All children learn the sounds of their language without having to be taught explicitly. All they need is exposure.… Continue reading 3 Reasons why segmenting is the mother of all skills in learning to read and spell

A question I’m often asked by both parents and teachers is what you do when the child you’re working with comes up against a word that has in it a sound-spelling correspondence (SSC) you haven’t yet covered. Here’s what to do. Supposing you’ve covered the (SSCs) [a] [i] [m] [s] [t] [n] [o] [p] [b]… Continue reading We’ve got it covered