Phonics & early reading insights

Your questions answered
Your questions answered
Answers to some of the questions we get asked regularly! If you have a question we haven't covered, please email us and we'll add it. Read more...
My child knows the sounds but can't blend them
My child knows the sounds but can't blend them
Sounding out and blending are two entirely different skills. Sounding out is recognising a spelling; blending is holding those sounds in working memory and pushing them together. If your child... Read more...
What is a decodable book?
What is a decodable book?
Decodable books are controlled texts where every word is built from spellings a child has already been taught. Decodability isn’t a fixed badge — it depends entirely on where your... Read more...
Decodable or levelled readers: which does a beginner need?
Decodable or levelled readers: which does a beginner need?
Decodable books match the spellings a child has been taught; levelled books group by difficulty, expecting unknown words. Teaching beginners to reach for pictures and sentence context builds a guessing... Read more...
How to use the word list in a decodable book
How to use the word list in a decodable book
The pages before the story do three jobs: tell you if the book is the right level, give words to practise, and flag helper words. Most people turn straight past,... Read more...
Why do children sometimes forget words they just read?
Why do children sometimes forget words they just read?
A word is not stored the first time it is read, or the second. If your child read a word on page four and lost it by page six, it’s... Read more...
Writing a story with five letters
Writing a story with five letters
The answer to a boring decodable book is a better decodable book, not a book with words the child cannot read. Loosen the code to make the writing easier and... Read more...
How decodable should a decodable book be?
How decodable should a decodable book be?
Pictures never carry a word. If the only route to a word is the illustration, the sentence gets rewritten. No word appears that cannot be reached by sounding out—not by... Read more...