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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 the early years. Learn why this matters on PRE.
Village Support for Parents of Children Aged Birth to 7
I’ll support YOU so you can support your child.
This is not a programme.
Parent support from Miss Emma
Emma Hartnell-Baker, MEd SEN
The Neurodivergent Reading Whisperer
Ensuring ALL children learn to read and WANT to read
“A marvellous fact is that this absorbent mind never feels fatigue. It is just like a camera: it clicks, and everything is there all of a sudden. ”
Maria Montessori
The 1946 London Lectures, p. 65
In a world where children are surrounded by constant stimulation, fast-paced content, and endless distractions, that “absorbent mind” Maria Montessori described is still there, but it is being pulled in many directions.
Early reading matters more than ever because it gives children the ability to slow down, focus, and sustain attention. When they can access books independently, they begin to experience deep reading, where attention is held, meaning is built, and thinking develops.
Without that, it becomes much harder for them to move beyond surface-level engagement. So helping children become confident readers early isn’t just about literacy. It’s about protecting their capacity to focus, to think deeply, and to learn in a world that rarely asks them to pause.
Miss Emma
I’ll show you how to teach your very young or dyslexic child to read so phonics actually makes sense.
Don’t wait until they start school. They may not get the personalised learning journey they need, or experience joy while learning phonics in a whole-class setting.
I’m leading a movement to reform phonics instruction. I’m not anti-phonics, far from it. I’m focused on making it work for every child by connecting letters and sounds through word mapping, so children can move into self-teaching and begin discovering the code for themselves, with a clear purpose: to read and to write.
Don’t wait until they start school.
When children start school in England, they are taught through a whole-class synthetic phonics programme. This is mandated.
These programmes teach a core set of around 100 grapheme–phoneme correspondences, with the expectation that children will use this knowledge to work out the rest of the code for themselves.
Some children do. But at least 1 in 5 struggle to make that transition. They may not retain or apply what they’ve been taught, and can quickly fall behind without the right support.
At the same time, another 1 in 5 are capable of moving ahead. They are held back by the pace and repetition of whole-class teaching, despite being ready to progress.
I understand that parents and teachers want a programme they can follow. You will soon be able to simply work through the books, with activities that support those books.
But the journey to get started depends on the child.
The groundwork matters more than you might realise, especially for the 1 in 5 at risk. We need to secure their phonemic awareness first and ensure they are confident using Phonemies®, as they will rely on them as a visual for sounds they may struggle to hear, order and blend, at least initially. That can be overcome.
Other children will move through this quickly. That difference is not about intelligence or oral language skills.
Every child needs a personalised learning journey.
Something you may not realise at first is that, although you can read, your brain has in some ways forgotten the work it did to get you there. You can decode and spell any as easily as and, many as easily as man, put as easily as cut. etc You can read The Chaos Poem! Children don't learn how to do that through explicit instruction.
I will show you how to ensure your child can do this without learning rules or memorising words. That means letting go of preconceived ideas about how reading and spelling should be taught. I’ll show you what phonics programmes are trying to achieve, but in a way that feels natural to even the youngest child’s brain.
Amari has just turned three, last week, and we will follow his journey. I’d love you to share yours too. The more we share, the easier it becomes to understand what is happening in children’s brains when learning is experienced as play.
This is about helping children move into the self-teaching phase as early as possible. When they can work out how speech and print connect, they begin building their own word bank, storing thousands of words during the most important years for learning to read, from birth to seven.
Your child will understand this, and you will understand this by watching them. Your job is to guide the process, learning with them. Let go of the idea of 'teaching' in the traditional sense, and embrace
Let’s work together to get your child reading and enjoying reading.
We must understand that anything which animates the child is a help to his development. ”
Maria Montessori
The 1946 London Lectures, p. 129
This is why we chose these books.
Let’s Stop High-Risk Children Struggling to Read
Reading and Spelling Guidance from Expert Emma Hartnell-Baker
In a recent clip, Rex, the son of Stacey Solomon and Joe Swash, is encouraged to “sound it out” as he struggles with a word.
Stacey is supportive. She is patient. She is doing exactly what she has been told to do.
But what if the problem isn’t effort, encouragement, or confidence?
What if the problem is the instructional approach itself?
Joe has spoken openly about being dyslexic. That means Rex may be at higher risk of reading difficulties. Yet even when parents know there is risk, they are rarely told what to do differently. They are often advised to keep practising, to encourage sounding out, and to make sure the child does not feel bad about struggling.
Protecting a child’s self-esteem matters.
But preventing the struggle in the first place matters more.
This is why I do what I do.
I am Emma Hartnell-Baker, a dyslexia expert specialising in ensuring neurodivergent and high-risk children learn to read successfully. My work focuses on what actually needs to happen in the brain for reading to become secure, fluent and independent.
English is an opaque orthography. It does not work in simple one-to-one sound–letter patterns. Many children can manage this complexity. Many cannot, especially those with dyslexia, speech and language differences, ADHD, autism or other neurodivergent profiles.
When we rely only on “sounding it out” without making the structure of the code visible, some children begin to believe they are failing.
They are not failing.
The instruction is incomplete.
Through MyWordz® Technology and The Code Overlay, I show parents and teachers how to make grapheme–phoneme relationships visible. Instead of guessing or memorising, children learn to map speech sounds to letters accurately and confidently. They are given all the information, and this is withdrawn when they are ready. Not the other way around. We START with giving them support. This builds the orthographic lexicon and supports the self-teaching process that underpins fluent reading and spelling.
Even the most supportive parents are not being shown how to adapt instruction for children at higher risk.
I will.
If your child is struggling, if dyslexia runs in your family, or if you sense that “just sound it out” is not enough, I can help you understand what’s really happening and what to do next.
Let’s stop children struggling.
Let’s ensure they read.
Miss Emma
Rather than waiting for children to learn enough grapheme–phoneme correspondences to access real books, we show them the code as soon as they understand what reading and spelling are, connecting speech and print.
We begin with the Speech Sound Play plan to check they can hear and identify the sounds. Through the SSP Green and Purple Code levels, they practise blending sounds and building words. They receive enough of a structured kick-start to begin the One, Two, Three and Away! books with confidence.Instead of restricting reading to tightly controlled texts until a threshold of GPC knowledge is reached, we make the full code visible. Children can see exactly which letters represent which sounds within real stories.
We begin with simple books, supported by The Code Overlay, so that every word is fully decodable for that individual child. As their understanding strengthens, the visual support is gradually withdrawn. The goal is not dependence on the overlay, but confident, independent reading.
This means the learning journey is self-paced and personalised. Children are not forced to wait until they “know enough” of the code to read with ease. The text is made accessible, and decoding becomes accurate from the outset.
By making the grapheme–phoneme structure explicit, we remove guessing and reduce cognitive overload. Children experience success early, build fluency more securely, and move steadily towards independent, self-teaching reading.
