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, making word mapping visual, linguistic, and fun. The result is earlier, easier Word Mapping Mastery® for all within the neurodiverse classroom.
One,Two, Three and Away!
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
Learning Plan – The Flow
To ensure that no child is left behind, and that you are attuned to the speech-sound processing needs of each child, regardless of when you start this (how old the child is), please begin with the 10-Day Speech Sound Play Plan at SpeechSoundPlay.com and continue until the children have mastered the Green and Purple Core Code Levels by using the Speech Sound Pics® (SSP) Approach tech-based activities.
This means there is less “teaching” from adults and more learning. Guide the child to use the resources and technology to figure it out themselves. Because the words are Code Mapped® to show the graphemes and Monster Mapped® to show the sound value, you are not needed other than for support and to monitor progress. The code is visible, and no prior knowledge of grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) is needed as a prerequisiteto mapping any words - they simply need to know the 'monster sounds'.
There are Core Code Level readers to accompany the Green and Purple Code Level activities, and skills and concepts should be reinforced and consolidated using the Monster Spelling Piano app for tablets (MonsterSpellingPiano.com). Children are also learning high-frequency words with the Duck Level resources and using the Monster Spelling Piano. It is not really about the words; it is about the new mapping knowledge they acquire by seeing the graphemes while hearing the associated sounds. It is about brains becoming pattern seekers, so they begin self-teaching.
Children also use the MyWordz® technology (MyWordzTechnology.com) to reinforce the universally accepted phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences, and they understand there may be discrepancies according to how they speak. Non-speaking children have the added bonus that the technology provides them with a voice.
When they have mastered the Green and Purple Code Levels (check with the assessment booklet in the shop at SpeechSoundPlay.com/shop) you can start the One, Two, Three and Away! Monster Mapped pre-readers can be explored even while you continue with the Speech Sound Pics Approach Yellow and Blue Core Code Level activities and high-frequency words at the same time. By the end of the Blue Code Level most children will be moving quickly through the Introductory readers and on their way to self-teaching, when all they need to do is read. The final chapter in the book outlines how we use the books to build spelling brains, making reading even easier.
One, Two, Three and Away! - adapted for NeuroReadies - Teacher Handbook now on sale!
Please ask your local library to stock the books so that all children can access them!
