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Speedie Readies: One, Two, Three and Away! with The Code Overlay. The Upstream Team supports the Word Mapping Mastery System®. The pre-mapped Village With Three Corners book series gets children excited about reading in Reception. Learn why this matters on PRE.
How did the Red-hats, Blue-hats, Yellow-hats, and Day families come to the Village With Three Corners?
Read these Story Picture Books with the children in Term 1 so that when they begin the Pre-Readers in Term 2, they’ve already had a term of systematic phonics, understand the concept of phoneme–grapheme mapping, and know how to “follow the sounds to say the words”. The Phonemies are phoneme symbols.
They’ll be ready to explore the books because the code is shown, and they’ll also be excited to read them because the characters in The Village With Three Corners are already familiar.
How the Red-hats Came to The Village With Three Corners
How the Blue-hats Came to The Village With Three Corners
How the Yellow-hats Came to The Village With Three Corners
How the Days Came to Market Sleeping
In term 2 of Reception, or when children are confident with the GPCs s, a, t, p, i, n, m, d, g, o, c, k, ck, e, u, r, h, b, f, l, ll, ss. start the pre-readers. This is because they now understand that we are connecting speech sounds and letters to read and spell.
There are 36 Pre-Readers and 16 Introductory Readers, each available in three versions:
• graphemes only
• graphemes with their sound value shown
• regular text
There are also 20 Blue Platform Readers and 20 Main Readers, plus additional titles. By the end of the Main Readers, children are independent readers who read for pleasure.
By the Blue Platform stage, they no longer need the Code Overlay. Some hardly need it from the beginning, but it ensures that children at risk have the phonemic awareness and phonological working memory support needed to prevent the Dyslexia Paradox.
From Term 2 of Reception, the focus shifts to reading for pleasure. Not as a distant hope following books written only to practise grapheme recognition and blending, but as a lived experience. Children develop reading behaviours and an identity as readers who choose to read and can’t wait to dive into the next book.