The Speech Sound Pics (SSP) Approoch is the only self-paced phonics approach for Reception Classrooms. Word Mapping leads to self-teaching!
Phonics kick-starts Self-Teaching
We screen on entry, phonics is self-paced, and monitoring is ongoing. We’ve eliminated requests for dyslexia diagnoses because no child is below expected levels.
They simply cannot move up to high school unable to read, unless there is a cognitive impairment. Period.
It gets so much harder if children have not entered the self-teaching phase by age seven, and struggling in secondary school can be horrendous.
I see them as instructional casualties, but they don’t. They think there’s something wrong with them. It breaks my heart. It has to stop.
Emma Hartnell-Baker MEd SEN
We offer the Core Code through self-paced learning. Once children reach the end of Purple Code Level, they also begin the complementary Speedie Readies pathway.
Speedie Readies exposes children to many more mapped words and helps them understand how to read levelled readers. The early books are repetitive and predictable, but the stories soon draw children in and make them excited to read.
This matters because children need opportunities to use partial decoding and Set for Variability with words whose meaning they already know and have heard before, even when they contain correspondences that have not yet been explicitly taught. For example, a child who has not been taught ‹e› as /ɪ/ will work out England, particularly when it appears in a meaningful sentence.
We want children to meet words containing untaught correspondences. This gives them the opportunity to decode as far as they can, work out the word, then track back and notice the new correspondence. That is how they begin to teach themselves the code.
SSP teachers go further by checking and recoding, each term, whether children have entered the self-teaching phase. For example, a child might read: “The cat drank a pint of milk.” The ‹i› in pint has not been explicitly taught. If they initially say it to rhyme with lint, but then switch to the correct pronunciation because it makes sense in the sentence, they are already using Set for Variability. They are moving towards secure orthographic mapping.