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. Preventing the dyslexia pardox!
Can two year olds read? Miss Emma explains why it is easier when children are taught from speech to print rather than through synthetic phonics programmes, which show graphemes first instead of starting with the sound value.
Speech Sound Play in the Toddler Room
Speech Sound Play is designed to meet individual speech, language and communication needs (SLCN) through schema-driven support that builds on each child’s existing knowledge and interests.
The 10 Day Plan is created for Reception classrooms, recognising the pressure on teachers to begin a synthetic phonics programme quickly. It helps prepare children for phonics by giving them a strong foundation in speech sound articulation and awareness.
However, the best way for a child to begin learning will always depend on the child. When we start while they are still tots, we have the freedom to offer personalised learning, to meet their unique needs, from the very beginning. There is less 'planning' and more play.
Reading is the by-product of early speech sound play, not its goal.
These are three year olds exploring the connections between speech and environmental print
Two-Year-Olds Can Read!
Contrary to what you might see on social media, it is highly unlikely that a two-year-old will learn to read through synthetic phonics instruction. A toddler can certainly learn to say a sound when looking at a grapheme (or Speech Sound Monster®) and can memorise many whole words, as was famously shown in the Your Baby Can Read programme. The company behind that programme was sued because babies cannot 'read', and toddlers who memorise words are not genuinely reading either. Reading requires understanding the meaning of text, not just recalling the meaning of single words.
You can see a two-year-old actually reading in the example below. When learning phonics, such as synthetic phonics in Reception, children can only create a few sentences using words that contain the taught graphemes and must still learn high-frequency words. On social media you may see people “teaching” high-frequency words in ways that lead toddlers to memorise rather than read. That's not great for brains, even if it's a good party trick and can look impressive on social media.
Excitingly, however, some two-year-old toddlers can read words from left to right with speech-sound symbols if they can blend. A few two-year-olds begin to process those sounds into words so quickly that they have the cognitive resources to understand the sentence by the time they reach the end, and they soon start to notice the corresponding letters. This is the opposite of synthetic phonics, which expects children to know the sound value first and then blend. It makes more sense though as more aligned with their normal development. They are all learning to speak, and most will achieve this naturally. When we show them Speech Sound symbols as 'monsters' they understand the concept, and what we mean by 'follow the monster sounds to day the word' - if they have good speech sound processing skills.
Because English has an opaque orthography, toddlers can only progress so far with synthetic phonics, and most two-year-olds would not remain engaged. Interestingly, many of the toddlers I work with who read fluently at an early age are autistic. They seem drawn to the mathematical patterns involved: they can work out words with the 48 Speech Sound Monster® tiles and the graphemes are secondary. Many don't realise there are more than 350 graphemes! Far too many to be taught expicitly, It is no surprise that a speech-to-print approach makes far more sense for these early readers, and when the Monster Mapped® Words are in books that they enjoy, with predictable and repetitive words within the 36 pre-readers, they are soon exploring them independently. They soon start to read with the graphemes!
The technology has also been a game changer for the really young children I play with. If you are near West Parley, Dorset, ask me to come and visit your toddler room. I will tell you which children are ready to read with Speech Sound Monsters®, and which need Speech Sound Play, as they are at risk of finding phonics difficult to learn because of speech-sound processing challenges. We are screening children for dysexia risk as they are about to turn three, at the Early Dyslexia Screening Centre.
Helping toddlers connect speech sounds with Speech Sound Pics (graphemes), supporting self-teaching and joyful reading.
Orthographic Mapping is the process that explains how every child learns to read. This is settled science. The real challenge, often referred to as The Reading Wars, is not about what happens in the brain, but how best to help children reach the point where they can read words automatically, without 'sounding them out'.
Take a word like chorphalactic. It’s made up, you have never seen it before or know what it means, but you can still 'read' it. That is because your brain has linked speech sounds, spellings, and meanings over time. It recognises the logic of English. Our technology helps young children start making these connections earlier by making them visible. This is a world first.
Learning phonics with programmes can be slow and frustrating, and not take into account the individual child and their needs and interests. Many toddlers simply want to look at words that are personal to them, and books they love. But traditional phonics programmes delay access by design. If a child had to decode Thomas the Tank Engine step by step — Th/o/m/a/s th/e T/a/n/k E/n/g/i/n/e — they might not manage it for years. And even after working through the 'scope and sequence' of a phonics programme, some of those correspondences such as th for /t/ or the schwa sounds, may not have been talked about or taught yet. Toddlers can see the structure immediately. Which parts matter, at that stage? Sound processing - the skills used to figure out words with Phonemies, and spell in sounds, underpins reading and spelling, and are the skills poor readers struggle with.
Our tools solve this problem of developing phonemic awareness and understanding the speech sound connection. We have made the English spelling system, one of the most complex in the world, visible and learnable. No one else has done this. What was once an opaque code has been made transparent. Not only this, we have made it exciting to young minds, and it is presented as play for the brain. Play is something they choose - and they choose to play with the Speech Sound Monsters, and want that bridge between speech and the words around them.
With our clickable version of the 123 and Away books, even toddlers can explore real stories and words that interest them, and act out the stories with the Story People 'Speekie Peeps'. This supports orthographic mapping with scaffolded self-discovery, faciliating what is known as self-teaching, a powerful process described in decades of reading research. It explains how readers can decode unfamiliar or nonsense words such as crodsquinkled the very first time they see them. The science of learning shows us why the Phonemies support learning to read from speech to print, and how to make the learning journey as easy and pleasurable as possible for ALL.
People often say that English spelling is confusing, crazy or even stupid. But written English only appears chaotic when its structure is hidden. When children can see how the code works, the confusion disappears. Using our Code Mapping Tools and Phonemies, to show the graphophonemic structure, the way to decode and pronounce ALL words becomes easy, at the click of a button. It is similar to Set for Variability when children use the code to reach the target word, even when they use a different accent to the one presented - they translate the universal spelling code to the speech they use. It is incredibly hard to do when the code is not shown. Many children become frustrated and disengage.
Another Level 7 SEN specialist and I, both neurodivergent, have set up My SLCN CIC, a not-for-profit organisation. Our goal is to make the clickable version of the 123 and Away books freely available to families and cost-effective for nurseries and schools. Some may not support this flexible discovery-learning approach, especially if they prefer rigid teaching of grapheme–phoneme correspondences with matched decodable books for independent reading, or if they do not fully understand how the reading brain develops.
But every child needs to learn to read by the age of seven. This approach makes that possible, and joyful.
They can learn to read, and so they want to read, for both learning and pleasure. We hope the two become closely connected. The more they read, the more they learn.
Miss Emma
Emma Hartnell-Baker MEd SEN
Former Outstanding Nursery Owner and OFSTED Inspector.
"Our two boys go back to this video time and time again. They can't get enough of these clips."
Tahlia