I Can Read Without You (ICRWY) Project: A Focus on the Speech Sound Connection

One, Two, Three and Away! The Village with Three Corners

Access The Village with Three Corners stories as videos and booklets within the I Can Read Without You (ICRWY) lessons app and were used within the I Can Read Without You (ICRWY) Early Years Project in 2021
These were used a 'reading scheme' in the UK, in the 80s, and have been out of print because the DfE mandated that only 'decodable' readers be used in the early stages, and that explicit phonics be the way in which children would learn to read. 

Miss Emma has secured the rights in order to bring back 'The Hats', with words 'Code Mapped' so that children use decoding strategies rather than guesswork.
Children in the I Can Read Without You (reading for pleasure by 6) project trialled them within the ICRWY Pilot! They are introduced at specific times of the learning journey and children become excited about reading - for pleasure. 

 Sheila K. McCullagh MBE (3 December 1920 – 7 July 2014) was an English author. Born in Surrey, her work was first published in the 1950s. Since then she went on write many children’s fantasy and educational books, including Dragon Pirate Stories, Griffin Pirate Stories, Puddle Lane, The Village with Three Corners or One Two Three and Away, Tim and the Hidden People (series) Hummingbirds, Seahawk, Buccaneers (series) - Illustrated by Derek Collard, Adventures in Space, Little Dragons and of course Puddle Lane (for television) 
 

Sheila died  July 7, 2014 in Bradford on Avon, United Kingdom

The stories were written with the goal that children are immersed in a literacy-rich environment, and experience pleasure during the learning to read phase. As they are not written using a scaffolded number of high frequency graphemes (as within the decodable readers included in commercial phonics programs) they were criticised for 'encouraging three cueing strategies', which was heavily discouraged in the UK following the Rose Report .

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In the Primary National Strategy (2006a), the three cueing model (known in Great Britain as the Searchlight model) is finally and explicitly discredited. Instead, the Strategy has acknowledged the value of addressing decoding and comprehension separately in the initial stage of reading instruction."

"… attention should be focused on decoding words rather than the use of unreliable strategies such as looking at the illustrations, rereading the sentence, saying the first sound or guessing what might 'fit'. Although these strategies might result in intelligent guesses, none of them is sufficiently reliable and they can hinder the acquisition and application of phonic knowledge and skills, prolonging the word recognition process and lessening children's overall understanding."

"Children who routinely adopt alternative cues for reading unknown words, instead of learning to decode them, later find themselves stranded when texts become more demanding and meanings less predictable. The best route for children to become fluent and independent readers lies in securing phonics as the prime approach to decoding unfamiliar words (Primary National Strategy, 2006b, p.9)."

So these 'reading schemes' and also 'levelled' readers (eg F&P or used within PM benchmarking) are currently very much discouraged.
 

A recent APM report stated that 'The Arkansas Division of Secondary and Elementary Education announced in October 2019 that any curriculum that utilizes cueing strategies won’t be approved for use in the state, meaning that Calkins’ materials and another popular program, Fountas and Pinnell Classroom, are effectively banned'.
 
The approach introduces high frequency words and controls the number of words, and uses illustrations so the children can guess or predict words, and deduce meaning. However if words were shown outside of the books the children may not 'remember' them. They are predictable and can be repetitive.

Because phonics is an essential element of teaching reading and spelling, in order to meet the needs of the highest number of children, 'decodable readers' have become more popular. You will have seen Miss Emma introduce decodable readers in Shana's Year 2 class about 6 years ago, in a school that did not use them. There is a huge market for 'decodable readers' in order to give children the opportunity to identify and blend the 100 or so high frequency graphemes they are learning, and for them to be used within meaningful context. 
 

Dr Paul Gardner, senior lecturer in Literacy Education at WA's Curtin University, said the reading wars had caused much tension and conflict in education. He is concerned by the Federal Government's moves to implement a national Year 1 phonics screening check because, he said, it was a flawed method of assessing student outcomes. He said the push towards synthetic phonics also tended to be supported by commercial enterprises promoting decodable books.

"There is profit to be made in this particular approach," he said.

"If you take a much broader approach to the teaching of early reading, you actually take it out of the economic sphere."

However, there are over 350 graphemes seen in 'real' books, and so even when children have learned the graphemes taught explicitly within phonics programs it can be years before they can actually READ.  

This is one reason WHY the three cueing system has persisted, even with the wide range of 'decodable readers' available on the market. And despite the understanding that children need to understand the phoneme to grapheme mapping of words there is currently little research relating to how useful 'decodable readers' are, other than in the initial stages.  

From Corrigendum: Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition From Novice to Expert

'Beyond the initial stages of reading, however, the case for decodable books weakens. First, evidence indicates that once children have learned a core set of grapheme-phoneme correspondences, they get no more opportunity to practice these in decodable books than they do in other books they might be reading (i.e., books not specifically written with decodability in mind). Solity and Vousden (2009) analyzed the vocabulary within three sets of books in the United Kingdom: two structured reading schemes consisting of specially written books for school children containing highfrequency and phonically regular words and one set of story books found in typical Year 1 and 2 classrooms (i.e., children ages 5–7). They found that the percentage of monosyllabic words within the books that would be decodable by children knowing 64 grapheme-phoneme correspondences was equal across the three sets (approximately 75%). A second issue with decodable books is that they are likely to be somewhat restricted in word choice and so may tend to be inferior to real books in (a) maintaining children’s interest and motivation to read and (b) in achieving the broader goals of building children’s vocabularies and knowledge. Solity and Vousden (2009) give the example of the words used in the book The Three Billy Goats Gruff (Sharratt & Tucker, 2004) with the analogous decodable reader Billy the Kid (Miskin, 2008). The only word used to describe the characters speaking to each other in Billy the Kid is said, which is repeated 11 times. In contrast, in the book The Three Billy Goats Gruff, the word said is also used 11 times, but eight other words and phrases are used to describe how the different characters speak (e.g., shouted out, grunted, replied, roared, snapped, and spluttered). As we discuss later in this review, exposure to complex words and nuanced meanings is important. Therefore, in our view, once children move beyond the very early stages of reading, the benefits of decodable readers are likely to be outweighed by their limitations. More research is needed to determine when this tipping point occurs'

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