A Specialist Literacy Teacher
When you meet me, I’ll tell you that I teach dyslexic kids how to read, but really, as a Specialist Literacy Teacher, I help all sorts of children develop their reading, spelling, writing, and oral language skills using evidence-based methods based on the Science of Reading.
I’m also a children’s author and lover of children’s literature, so when I first became a teacher, I wanted to make sure that the kids around me got the chance to love stories as much as I did. I’d been worked in developing countries for years with children who didn’t have access to quality, reliable education, let alone printed books, so it was an easy change to become a teacher to make sure that Australian kids got these things.
This meant that when we found out our son was dyslexic, it was a big shock to realise that we couldn’t find anyone to provide him with the evidence-based, specialist support he needed. His school wasn’t teaching him in the way he needed to be taught, and we had trouble sourcing the clinical support he needed.
I retrained so I could do it myself.
It turned out that we weren’t the only ones having trouble working out what do to and where to get help. Despite decades of clear, cognitive research about reading and the brain and the best ways to teach reading based on that, it was hard to find schools anywhere that were comprehensively and consistently teaching that way, let alone people providing clinical support.
I very quickly found myself supporting a large number of children and families, firstly in schools and then in private practice. Now after years of experience and training, I mainly work with neurodivergent children and children with learning difficulties. One of my favourite parts of the job is supporting their families to take their own action and seek support from the community.
Things are Beginning to Change in Literacy Education
I’m very happy to say that things are beginning to change in literacy education in schools. Many Australian state governments have mandated the use of systematic synthetic phonics to teach reading and spelling. This is great news for our new readers because the well-established research evidence shows that this forms the core of the best way to teach all children how to read. It’s not the only factor in teaching children to read, but it is vital.
How School of Monsters Can Help
Sally Rippin created the School of Monsters to give parents and children a series of books that could be used as a bridge between the ‘decodable readers’ children use at school and chapter books children read independently. With the widespread introduction of the use of phonics in schools, we saw another way that the Monsters could help and we developed the School of Monsters Fun with Phonics Kit.
This kit consists of a set of 70 phonics flashcards and a workbook to help children learn one of the most crucial skills in learning to read: being able to automatically associate a letter with the sound it represents. (Grapheme/Phoneme Correspondence).
Grapheme/Phoneme Correspondence (GPC) is the relationship between letters or groups of letters (graphemes) and the sounds they make (phonemes). Basically, it's about matching written symbols to their sounds.
This kit doesn’t replace you school’s reading program, instead it give you a fun way to practice one of the most fundamental foundational skills.
Cool Features of the Phonics Kit
Kids love the illustrations, particularly the characters
The illustrations on the reverse of the cards provide a ‘memory hook’ for the sounds if your child needs a hint. Remember, hints are okay—this is learning not a test
The vowels and digraphs are different colours to help children recognise that they are different
This pack goes beyond just the alphabet sounds. It has the most commonly used vowel digraphs. This is sometimes called the ‘extended code’.
The cards have the It has the ‘Silent-e’ digraph and open syllable long vowel sounds
School of Monsters Phonics Kit Sneaky Secret
There’s a sneaky hidden treasure hunt game in the Phonics Workbook. All the sentences have been taken from the School of Monsters books so if you have an eagle-eyed kid who loves finding all the secret jokes in Wheels and Springs and Moving Things, they might like to try and find which School of Monsters stories the sentences come from.
Technical Terms You Might Hear
Phonics: The relationship between letters and the sounds they make.
Systematic Synthetic Phonics: Teaching children how to read by teaching them the ‘code’ of English, starting with the smallest part—the sounds—and teaching children how to blend them into words in a systematic order that ensures there aren’t any gaps in a child’s knowledge, and each bit of knowledge builds on the last.
The Science of Reading: A body of research based in cognitive science, linguistics and related topics that explains how people learn to read. It holds that reading is a ‘biologically secondary’ skill that must be explicitly taught—humans are not ‘hardwired’ to learn to read by themselves. It shows that that effective reading instruction focuses on teaching skills like phonics, phonological awareness, vocabulary, comprehension, fluency, and oral language through clear, structured methods.
The Simple View of Reading: A core theory in the Science of Reading that states that that reading comprehension is the result of two key groups of skills: word recognition (decoding) and language comprehension working together.
The Reading Rope: Is another core theory that breaks down ‘word recognition’ and ‘language comprehension’ into smaller parts that makes it easier to understand the complex nature of these two things and therefore helps guide people in assessing and teaching reading.
The Big 6 of Reading
Six elements of reading and language that should inform literacy lessons.
Phonics: The relationship between letters and the sounds they make.
Phonological Awareness: The ability to hear and work with sounds in spoken language.
Fluency: Reading smoothly, accurately, and with expression.
Comprehension: The ability to understand and make sense of what is read.
Vocabulary: The collection of words a person knows and understands.
Oral Language: The ability to speak and understand spoken language, including the way words work together in sentences.