Welcome to Speedie Readies, part of the Word Mapping Mastery system®. A self-teaching pathway for communication, reading and spelling in the early years. Learn how to use the orthographically mapped Village With Three Corners book series online.
Ten Minutes a Day!
Speedie Readies is designed for Ten Minutes a Day, With a TA and can be used 1:1 with children after a short introductory presentation, supported by an online help area. It removes the standard Wait to Fail approach, where children’s struggles often aren’t identified until they’re seven or older, and it does not add extra burden on the classroom teacher. Tutors can easily fit this into their toolkit as a supplementary resource.
In England, it is assumed that a DfE-validated systematic synthetic phonics programme provides sufficient support for every child to become a fluent reader. This is the basis of current DfE policy. As a result, additional support is not put in place until children fall behind, for example when 1 in 5 fail the Phonics Screening Check (PSC), creating the dyslexia paradox: we wait for difficulty to appear rather than preventing it. There are currently no programmes known to support all of these children effectively once they have fallen behind, as reflected in SATs data. For the past ten years, 1 in 4 children have been unable to read and spell at minimum expected levels by age 11, and reading for pleasure is at an all-time low. This pattern has not occurred in comparable countries, where whole-class phonics is not mandated as the sole approach and where teachers have greater autonomy.
Yet the foundations for reading and spelling are formed between birth and age 7, long before failure is visible.
⭐ What it is
Speedie Readies is a complete bi-directional word mapping system that shows children the full code within meaningful text so they can learn to read and spell with ease. It enables the adult to find out exactly what each child needs before difficulties appear and gives them a clearer pathway into word mapping mastery and early reading success that is engaging for that unique child.
⭐ What makes it different
Every other system teaches whole class phonics first and waits for individual children to struggle before giving personalised support. Speedie Readies offers a way to screen for risk early, the tech and books show the whole code from the start, and it prevents the dyslexia paradox by giving each child what they need when they need it as if it were designed just for them.
The goal is for the child to be intrinsically motivated to read for pleasure, because no teaching can make a child a reader. Most of learning to read happens implicitly, through engagement with text once the conditions for self-teaching are in place.
Ten Minutes a Day, With a TA
Getting Started
Ten Minutes a Day, With a Parent or TA.
The Innovate UK funded MyWordz® word mapping technology provides real-time guidance, helping the adult support a child on a 1:1 basis, while showing how speech and print connect. Part of the tech is MySpeekie®, the first one-screen AAC for non-speaking children. The speech-to-print connection can be formed without the need to produce speech.
It complements whole-class phonics instruction, regardless of programme, so sessions never conflict with what the child is doing in the classroom at school. Children are shown the orthographic code, so also ideal for those with hearing difficulties.
The updated Monster Spelling Piano app for tablets enables at least 90% of children to pass the PSC by the end of Reception. That result will please Bridget Phillipson in the schools we are supporting in England, but for us the real goal is different: it frees up time to focus on reading for pleasure, not on being explicitly taught more GPCs.
Teachers have 25 or more children to support, which is why whole-class instruction is so popular, as easier to manage learning that way, yet one in five children in Reception need one-to-one time that teachers simply do not have. A TA or empowered parents, who can use Speedie Readies at home, is a powerful weapon against illiteracy.
The TA or parent spends ten minutes a day with the children identified as at risk in Term 1 until they reach the point of self-teaching.
This is a rough guide.
Week 1
The adult learns to identify early indicators of dyslexia risk using the Monster Spelling Piano app for tablets and becomes familiar with the Phonemies®. No prior knowledge of phonemic awareness and phonological awareness screening required.
Week 2
The parent or TA uses the activities in the Speedie Readies handbook and begins to explore word mapping with the children using the MyWordz® technology, funded by Innovate UK. They learn about the orthographic code (and how to understand the 'letters and sounds' connections) alongside the children.
Week 3
Children start reading orthographically mapped stories that make the grapheme–phoneme structure of each word visible. This bridges early phonological work with connected-text reading, supporting decoding, spelling, and self-teaching. They are learning phonics in a different way - embracing linguistic and neurdiversity. Even if the adult knows nothing about English orthography and the issues it presents to those teaching phonics, or how accents affect these correspondences.
Children love these stories, and because the orthographic code is made visible in the first 52, all words become decodable regardless of their existing knowledge. They quickly begin to enjoy reading and want to find out what happens next.
The process continues until the child has worked through the 36 pre-readers, followed by the 16 introductory readers. These 52 orthographically mapped stories are available in The Reading Corner (members area). Anyone can join to access the whole One, Two, Three and Away! series. Parents can join - £10 per month. The member area also shows how to ensure that every child can pass the Phonic Screening Check before Year 1.
After the 52 mapped readers, they can move on to the 20 Blue Platform readers, which are code mapped (without Phonemies). They can use the MyWordz technology if they are stuck on words.
By the time they reach the 20 Main Readers, they are reading to learn, no longer learning to read. They are self-teaching.
We use this with KS2 children, usually aged seven to eleven, who have SEN and SpLD. The Speedie Readies system takes them back to the word reading level because they won’t be able to read with fluency and comprehension without this, even if they can understand more complex text when it’s read to them.
The Dual Route to Word Mapping Mastery
• The Core Code (100 GPCs)
• The Whole Code: Bi-directional Word Mapping within Meaningful Context
Monster Spelling Piano
Monster Mapped Readers
The Starting Point for Children Age 3 +
When screening for dyslexia risk before children start learning phonics (please see the 10-day Speech Sound Play Plan for Reception), we introduce the concept of Speech Sound Monsters (Phonemies®). Each one says its own sound, just as a dog says woof. These are the speech sounds we use when speaking English.
We observe how easily children can follow the Monster Sounds to say the word (blending) and how well they can hear the sounds in order to place them on blank speech sound lines (isolating, segmenting, and blending). The latter is more challenging because there is no visual hook.
To teach children to read and spell, we need them to connect three key elements: the speech sounds, the spellings (letters that map to those sounds), and the meanings. From the beginning, we link speech sounds with meaning. If children struggle with this stage, they will find linking all three elements far more difficult later. We therefore ensure they feel confident with this first.
Some children are ready for the pictures of sounds (the graphemes) on day one, but our main focus is on the one in four who are not, and this has nothing to do with intelligence. It relates to phonemic awareness. We are screening for that one in four. Some children overcome these difficulties during the 10-day plan, but it is those who continue to struggle with just these six Speech Sound Monsters, and with building or blending words using the monster sounds, who need early support. In Reception we show the children this first, and then start on the Green Code Level of the Monster Spelling Piano app.
A very small percentage of children with SEN find it difficult to remember the associated sounds after week one, even though each monster has a distinct movement and always appears in the satpin line. When we move the monsters onto the lines, we keep the set visible above. By watching the two-minute video of all the monsters daily, children also begin to associate each with its own musical cue.
When we introduce the concept of pictures of speech sounds, it becomes a logical next step, even after a short introduction to speech-to-print word mapping without print.