Use the SSP Speech Sound Play Plan before teaching any phonics programme, not just the Speech Sound Pics Approach, to screen for dyslexia risk by assessing phonemic awareness and phonological working memory. We are identifying the 1 in 4 children at risk of struggling to learn phonics before phonics instruction begins.
IPA-aligned Phonemies are Speech Sound Monsters®. They show children the speech sound value of letters. Letters are pictures of speech sounds (Speech Sound Pics®), making word mapping visual, linguistic, and fun. Reading for pleasure by 7!
“Give me a child before seven and I will make certain they never qualify for a dyslexia diagnosis.”
Emma Hartnell-Baker, The Early Dyslexia Screening Centre, DyslexiaWhisperers.com
Free Dyslexia Screening and Support for Children Aged 3 - 7: Join the Parent Hub
🌈 Dyslexia Re-RoutED: Free Early Dyslexia Screening for Three-Year-Olds
1 in 4 children are failed from day one in Reception. Teachers’ hands are often tied.
Sound processing difficulties and learning differences are overlooked.
Many of these children are highly intelligent, yet they are only taught to read and spell through synthetic phonics programmes in England. The DfE recommended the removal of Phase 1 to programme developers, which previously focused on sound processing. That means children now start with graphemes on day one.
These programmes do not embrace linguistic or neurodiversity and can stifle creativity.
More and more children decide they do not want to read. They stop identifying as readers, even when they are able to decode. Literacy impacts everything.
We are deeply concerned about the link between literacy and mental health. It is not the children’s fault they struggle, yet many believe it is. It is also often not the teachers’ fault. Teacher autonomy is at an all-time low.
My doctoral research centres on the lack of knowledge teachers have about supporting word mapping outside the phonics programme. This means 1 in 4 children are not getting what they need throughout the school day.
That is why we are launching ‘Screen at Three for Free’ from our new centre in Dorset. We will offer face-to-face training and equip professionals to deliver this screening themselves.
Through playful speech sound screening, we will identify children who need support before they are taught phonics in nursery or Reception.
Parents will be supported in the time before school begins so they understand what their child needs.
Nurseries will be able to learn more about learning differences and celebrate linguistic and neurodiversity.
When those children enter Reception, teachers will have access to our 10-Day Speech Sound Play Plan, designed for classroom use before phonics starts. This strengthens speech-sound processing so every child can begin phonics ready to succeed. We are thrilled that so many schools will be using it as children start Reception in England.
We will track these children through to KS2 and publish evidence showing that the struggling children you see now are instructional casualties.
🏴 We begin in Dorset and will expand this project nationally, and then to Australia. Any excuse for me to go back 🇦🇺
🧠 Screen at three. Rewire sound processing. Prevent requests for dyslexia assessments because no child falls below threshold. 📚
A Message from Rory's Mum.
When our eldest son was in Grade 3 he was diagnosed with dyslexia. Unfortunately by then the damage was done, his reading age was assessed as being below the age of six (he was 8.5 at the time). The most heart-breaking part of his journey was the devastating effect it had on his self-esteem.
The psychologist at the time introduced me to the Speech Sound Pics SSP approach, which turned out to be life-changing! Under Miss Emma's guidance, we cleared the slate and started his journey again at home after school. He warmed very quickly to the approach and in just five weeks he had increased six reading levels. I am extremely proud to announce that he is now in Grade 6 and reading at grade level!! In fact, he is doing so well that in his LP meeting recently I was questioned whether he even had a learning disability.
This brings us to Rory, our youngest. From a young age, he showed signs of possessing the same strengths and weaknesses as his older brother. Not willing to sit back and watch him suffer the same fate we jumped at the chance to be part of the ICRWY 'Speech Sound Monster Mapping' pilot, he was two months shy of his fifth birthday at the time.
Now at six, he is doing so well, this video is proof of that. This is Rory reading his home reader to me. So proud and so very grateful for Miss Emma and her innovative ideas and approach.
Reading and spelling are only part of the picture. Language and literacy challenges affect the whole family, and support should match the way you believe your child learns best. Please do join our new community: Learning to Listen
A few of the things we will be talking about as Dyslexia Whisperers!
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Chunking Learning and Information:
Breaking down information into smaller, manageable parts can make it easier to process. We will do that when teaching them to map words, and to read with fluency and comprehension.
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Visual Aids and Multi-sensory Learning:
Utilising visually mapped words, coding words, and learning with multi-sensory activities can enhance the process. Mapped Words® and Books are a game changer!
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Systematic Phonics-Based Instruction:
The Speech Sound Pics (SSP) approach focuses on the relationship between letters and sounds, crucial for those with dyslexia.
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Repetition and Review:
Repeated reading and practice help build fluency and reinforce skills with the SSP Routines.
Assistive Technology:
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Text-to-Speech Software:
MySpeekie® technology converts written text into spoken words, and has the additional bonus not offered elsewhere, as we show the grapho-phonemic structure, aiding comprehension.
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The Word Mapping tools map words in both directions - reducing cognitive load for dyslexic learners and increasing confidence
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Speech-to-Text Software:
This allows individuals to dictate instead of writing, and the writing is shown - showing the spelling of the words.
Dyslexic Brains
Children with dyslexia often have underlying difficulties with phonemic awareness and phonological working memory, which make it harder for them to learn phonics. Phonics instruction relies on the ability to isolate, segment, and blend sounds, as well as to hold sound sequences in memory while linking them to letters. Because these processes are impaired, dyslexic learners struggle to connect graphemes to phonemes, even for the most common patterns. To compensate, they often begin to memorise whole words. This may give the appearance of early progress, but it bypasses the self-teaching mechanism, where readers use knowledge of sound–letter relationships to decode unfamiliar words and build orthographic knowledge. Synthetic phonics programmes explicitly teach only around 100 correspondences. Without mastering even these, reading development tends to slow. Spelling remains especially difficult, fluency is compromised, and motivation often decreases. These children may begin to avoid reading and writing because each word demands sustained effort and fails to become automatic.
Screen at Three. Rewire Sound Processing. Dyslexia Re-RoutED.
MyWordz® with MySpeekie® – The Missing Link to Orthographic Mapping
A Breakthrough for Neurodivergent Brains
Shows the Code and Blends the Word Until Dyslexic Learners Can Do It Themselves.
We are Dyslexia Whisperers!
Mapped Words: A breakthrough for Dyslexic Learners
Mapped words take the guesswork out of reading and spelling. Instead of asking children to memorise whole words or rely only on the grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences they know so fars, each word is broken down into its speech sounds and linked directly to the letters that represent them. This makes the hidden structure of English visible.
For dyslexic learners, this is powerful because their difficulty often lies in connecting sounds to letters quickly and consistently. When the mapping is shown clearly, they can see which letters go together and which sound each part represents. This reduces memory load, builds confidence, and supports true understanding rather than rote recall.
Over time, repeated exposure to mapped words helps the dyslexic brain store words accurately, making reading and spelling more automatic. It opens the same pathway to independent reading and writing that many non-dyslexic learners reach more easily, but with the scaffolding dyslexic children need.
MyWordz® with MySpeekie® – The Missing Link to Orthographic Mapping
A Breakthrough for Dyslexic Brains.
Visit MappedWords.com to see Map and Drag! Have a free play!
"MyWordz® Shows the Code and Blends the Word Until Learners With Poor Phonemic Awareness and Phonological Working Memory Can Do It Themselves."
Know any children struggling to learn the most commonly used words in English?
They might be able to memorise these words as 'sight words' to recognise them while reading - but spelling them? That’s a whole different story. Without seeing the structure, it’s incredibly hard.
That’s why we created the 10-Day Speech Sound Play Plan - helping parents and teachers support children at risk of dyslexia by making the whole code visible and usable.
All statutory spelling words - known as Common Exception Words - are now shown clearly at SpeechSoundPlay.com
👉 Go to the Whole Code tab and see what’s possible.
10-Day Dyslexia 'Screen & Intervene' Plan with MySpeekie®: Develop speech sound awareness through Phonemies Play, supporting children before or alongside systematic synthetic phonics (SSP). The Speech Sound Play Phonemic Awareness Plan benefits not only young children, but also older struggling readers, learners with SLCN, neurodivergent learners, and even EAL students who need stronger sound–symbol awareness.
To prevent reading and spelling difficulties:
1. Prioritise phonemic awareness and phonological working memory.
Ensure that every child completes the 10-day Phonemic Awareness Mastery Plan. This acts as an essential early screening tool. Teachers will quickly identify which children cannot hear, segment, or blend speech sounds. These children can then begin targeted activities to develop their phonemic awareness before they are expected to connect sounds to letters. Teachers can monitor this progress and provide ongoing support. They blend lots of words, and are not restricted to 2 or 3 sound words.
2. Use Duck Hands® and Code Mapping® with Phonemies to make the speech–print connection visible.
All children should use Duck Hands® to identify how many sounds are in a word — even if they cannot hear the sounds clearly yet. They should be taught to see words as pictures of speech sounds (Speech Sound Pics®) with graphemes clearly highlighted through Code Mapping. This allows learners to see which letters work together (graphemes), and which sounds they represent (phonemes). These visual connections strengthen word learning and prevent the difficulties that many children — not only those with dyslexia — face when instruction assumes phonemic awareness has already developed. The MyWordz® with MySpeeie® tech blends the sounds when dyslexic students cannot do it themselves.
3. Teach words in meaningful context.
Avoid using isolated word lists or flashcards. Children need to encounter words in sentences, books, and real-world use. This supports vocabulary development and helps them draw on all available cues to figure out words they cannot yet decode. However, it's important to recognise that without visual support from a trained teacher or the MyWordz® with MySpeekie® tech, many children will struggle to recode words. Recoding is an essential part of learning to read and spell.
What is recoding?
Recoding is the process of using knowledge of letter–sound relationships to access the spoken form of a word from its written form. Even when a child manages to figure out a word, they must recode it in order to store it in the brain’s word bank — the orthographic lexicon. This process is essential for developing reading fluency and confident spelling.
To achieve orthographic mapping, children must connect print to speech and speech to print. Orthographic mapping is the most widely accepted theory explaining how children learn to read and spell.
Dyslexic learners may learn to read reasonably well, often through effortful strategies or memorisation, but without secure orthographic mapping, spelling continues to be a struggle. They need clear, repeated exposure to the sound–letter structure of words to store them for fast recognition and retrieval in writing.
Use MyWordz® to show the code in both directions.
MyWordz® helps children see and hear the code — it blends sounds for them and shows how letters map to phonemes. This supports the learning process for all children, especially those with dyslexia and related difficulties.
Buy the tech for £75 at: https://MyWordz.tech
More information: https://MyWordz.com
If the speech sounds, spelling and meaning aren't 'glued' together in the orthographic lexicon, children cannot instantly recognise words and retrieve them accurately for spelling.
Recoding is vital. If a child knows the word is 'orange' they can figure out the corrspondence not taught in phonics ie the sound value of the <a>
Or use the tech and SHOW them the graphemes and phonemes!
