17/08/2026
One concept we explicitly teach is that the same sound can be represented by different spellings.
Take the sound /ā/:
✏️ a → make, bake
✏️ ai → rain
✏️ ay → play
✏️ ea → great
So why teach this?
Because learning to read and spell isn’t simply about memorising words.
Children need to develop an understanding of the relationship between sounds (phonemes) and the letters that represent them (graphemes).
🔤 When reading, children use this knowledge to work out unfamiliar words.
✍️ When spelling, they need to think in the opposite direction:
“What sounds can I hear, and which spelling could represent those sounds?”
This is why we don’t just teach children to memorise that rain is spelled R-A-I-N.
We want them to understand:
/r/ /ā/ /n/ → rain
…and that the /ā/ sound can be represented in different ways depending on the word.
This builds flexible decoding and encoding skills, rather than relying on guessing, pictures, or memorising whole words.
And importantly, children don’t need to learn every spelling pattern all at once. We systematically introduce the code, practise it, and help children apply their knowledge across real words.
📚 The goal isn’t simply to read more words.
It’s to understand how our writing system works.
