Welcome to Speedie Readies. Join the Three Learning Corners, and access the orthographically mapped Village With Three Corner series of books online. Show the Code with Phonemies! Personalising Phonics through Word Mapping
Free Training with Emma Hartnell-Baker, The Neurodivergent Reading Whisperer®.
Phonemies are Speech Sound Character Monsters that simply say the sounds of English. As seen on PhonicsWithAnAccent.com, they are brilliant for showing the sound value and make it clear how those sounds change the pronunciation of the word.
My job is to make reading and spelling as easy as possible for the highest number of children, so I help teachers balance the demands of whole class instruction, which is mainly about organising larger groups, with personalised phonics instruction. When learning phonics in the classroom, at least 1 in 5 children in Reception and KS1 is at risk of struggling to move past the initial kick start of phonics to read with fluency and comprehension, and this can happen for a range of reasons.
My training and consultancy work centres on those children.
The letters that map to the sounds are called graphemes. I call them pictures of sounds, or Speech Sound Pics, in the early years because children can understand the concept of listening for sounds and thinking about what they might look like on paper. I’m an early years teacher and I’m passionate about introducing concepts in ways that every child can understand, building on their existing knowledge and understanding of the world.
The letters that map to the sounds are called graphemes. I call them pictures of sounds, or Speech Sound Pics, in the early years because children can understand the concept of listening for sounds and thinking about what they might look like on paper. I’m an early years teacher and I’m passionate about introducing concepts in ways that every child can understand, building on their existing knowledge and understanding of the world.
​From birth to three, children are seeing the Phonemies in order and understand the concept of follow the monster sounds to say the word. They do it with their names because they focus on the sounds, not the letters that connect as graphemes. In the name Freddie, he has seven letters but five Sound Pics, or graphemes, and five speech sounds, or phonemes. This would be far too complicated for a two year old to understand if we relied on letters alone. The Phonemies change everything. When he is ready, he will also start to notice the letters and see how they link to the sounds. This is a speech to print approach. At this point we do not need to work through a set of graphemes systematically because we are not teaching children to read and spell yet, we are laying the groundwork so that they will be able to learn to read and spell with ease.
I specialise in personalising phonics learning, but what is phonics?
Phonics instruction is designed to help children connect letters and sounds because this is the foundation of reading and spelling. Although the meaning of words is vital, if children can’t figure out a word quickly they spend too much time working out individual words, and comprehension becomes difficult, even for a child who can easily understand text that is read to them.
The mapping (connecting letters and sounds) of single words is incredibly important. Some children figure it out with very little instruction because they have strong phonemic awareness, they can easily isolate the sounds and can blend and segment, so linking these skills to letters causes no difficulty. Even if they guess at a written word they automatically recode it by figuring out the mapping backwards. These children start to self-teach the mapping of words with very little explicit instruction.
Unfortunately, the children who don’t do this naturally, around 1 in 5 and not linked to intelligence, are going to struggle if they’re not identified early. This is why we screen even before children start looking at letters. If we know they have weak speech sound processing we need to spend more time strengthening this before adding lots of new graphemes (1 - 5 letters that sit together and map to phonemes - eg the word eight has five letters, but only two sound - so the mapping is <eigh> <t>. My Code Mapping tool will show this as eight as we use the black and grey contrast to show the graphemes.
If the focus is on adding new graphemes when they can’t easily segment and blend, they’ll start to struggle because of cognitive load. This is why the 10 day Speech Sound Play Plan in Reception is crucial. It gives teachers the opportunity to spot those at risk children and provide intensive phonemic awareness training before they start phonics, before adding that load, and before they start to think of phonics as really hard. Or before they start to develop strategies to 'fake' it - bright children do this, and slip through the cracks if teachers aren't sure how to check.
We focus initially on six sounds that let them build more than twenty words with speech to print mapping, which then links directly to their phonics because the first group introduced is s a t p i n. Add in a few high frequency words and they’re decoding and writing full sentences before the middle of the first term. Restricting at risk children to the s a t p i n group for a few weeks is worth the extra time because the focus is on blending and segmenting, with graphemes as the secondary focus. A child with strong phonemic awareness can make graphemes their primary focus. This difference is vital in the first term of Reception. Children who have good phonemic awareness and good memory for letters and the sounds they represent are able to focus on comprehension.
This starting point creates a great foundation from which to strengthen phonemic awareness and support personalised word mapping.
Speedie Readies: The Dual Route to Word Mapping Mastery®
• The Core Code: Connects speech sound processing to print through about 100 commonly used graphemes and more than 100 mapped high frequency words. This provides the essential foundation that allows learners to begin self-teaching.
Most children who struggle haven’t started to bond speech sounds, spelling, and meaning efficiently enough to store words in the orthographic lexicon through self-teaching. They’re still trying to decode almost every word grapheme by grapheme, which is mentally exhausting.
• The Whole Code: Bi-directional word mapping within meaningful context that supports self-teaching and facilitates earlier orthographic mapping.
Most children who struggle aren’t exposed to the whole code within meaningful context because teachers are focused on the Core Code, for example through a phonics programme.
The tech shows the code they’re not being taught and not acquiring through self-teaching.
My child can't blend cvc words. What should I do?
This resource is part of the satpin handbook used in the Ten Day Speech Sound Play Plan.
We recommend the Monster Spelling Piano app
Here is a low resolution copy of the VPs to use for free!
If they know the sound value of the graphemes (the letters) but can't blend, give them the word. Then ask them to decode it again.
The brain soon starts to connect the sounds and spoken word. If you don't give the word they will sit there feeling stupid and want to avoid it.
Give the word, and ask them to say the sounds and blend them. The ideal, however, is that they have a visual prompt picture when developing PA, so they don't need your help. They feel as though they did it alone. That's a great feeling!