Speech Sound Play in the Toddler Room

​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.