Welcome to The Speech Sound Pics (SSP) Approach, with the Ten Day Speech Sund Play Plan, part of the Word Mapping Mastery system®. Letters that function as graphemes in words are known as sound pictures, that is, Speech Sound Pics. We show the Code through the Code Mapping Algorithm, with Phonemies making the sound value visible.
One,Two, Three and Away!
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The first 12 Pre-Readers can be accessed for free here
Why did The Reading Hut Ltd obtain the publishing rights to the One, Two, Three and Away! series, also known as The Village with Three Corners?
Sheila K. McCullagh was a British author renowned for her contributions to children’s literature, particularly educational reading schemes. Born on 3 December 1920 in Surrey, she began her career as a lecturer at Leeds University in the 1950s and later taught at a teacher’s college in London, Ontario. After 1963 she devoted herself to writing and went on to publish more than 300 titles, including Puddle Lane, Tim and the Hidden People, and The Village with Three Corners (also known as One, Two, Three and Away!). Her stories combined imaginative settings with a clear purpose: to help young children become readers.
My mother taught infants in the 1980s and used The Village with Three Corners every day. Her classroom was a place of singing, play, and conversation, with reading and writing woven through it all. The books were central to that environment, and their characters became part of children’s lives. Inspired by those memories, I trained as an early years teacher. When I began teaching, a headteacher advised me to avoid the series in favour of “rich literature,” but I chose to keep it. By the end of the year, all but two of my pupils were fluent readers who loved Roger Red-Hat and his friends.
This fourth edition of the teacher handbook has been adapted to support the republication of One, Two, Three and Away! by The Reading Hut Ltd. It explains why these stories deserve renewed attention. McCullagh displayed striking insight into how children learn to read, anticipating principles that were only formalised two decades later when Linnea Ehri described orthographic mapping theory. McCullagh understood that successful reading instruction requires the growth of a sight vocabulary, where words are stored for instant recognition through repeated encounters. She also included phonics instruction, as this handbook shows, but she did not yet know that to benefit from any type of word-mapping instruction, such as phonics, children must first be able to perceive and process the individual speech sounds in words.
This insight matters because it explains why two children in my own first class did not learn to read despite being able and motivated. At the time I did not understand what was missing from my support. The scheme provides everything needed for at least three in four children to achieve independent reading, but those two pupils lacked the phonemic awareness required to connect letters and sounds and so could not reach the self-teaching stage. They needed explicit help to “see” how letters and sounds connect, without detaching from the central focus of reading for pleasure. I wasn't giving it to them.
This handbook will retain what worked, but add to it. Unfortunately, when the Department for Education mandated synthetic phonics programmes in 2013, much of what had been effective was set aside, and reading-for-pleasure levels have since plummeted more than in any comparable country. England is the only nation to mandate synthetic phonics as the primary route to reading. While systematically taught phonics is useful for all, and crucial for some, the “how” of instruction is not settled science (Wyse & Bradbury, 2022). The same children with weak speech-sound processing are now being failed in greater numbers. Previously, many of these children were able to build phonemic awareness by engaging with predictable texts and repetitive high-frequency words, even without explicit instruction, and their motivation to read carried them forward. When Sir Jim Rose called for change, he noted that 16 per cent of children could not read at the expected level by age eleven (Rose, 2006). Since the introduction of synthetic phonics and standardised Key Stage 2 reading tests in 2016, that figure has remained at around 25 per cent.
The One, Two, Three and Away! handbook, provides an overview of how to use the scheme, including the book sequence and recommended activities. This handbook, adapted to facilitate Word Mapping Mastery® (WMM) and therefore reading fluency for at least 95 per cent of children within the neurodiverse classroom, shows how to add in what was missing. I have simply enhanced what was already brilliant to account for linguistic and neurodiversity.
Miss Emma MEd SEN
Neurodivergent Reading Whisperer
References
Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. Routledge.
Rose, J. (2006). Independent review of the teaching of early reading: Final report. Department for Education and Skills. https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/5551/2/report.pdf
Wyse, D., & Bradbury, A. (2022). Reading wars or reading reconciliation? Cambridge Journal of Education, 52(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/0305764X.2021.1976312
