Narrative driven, multi-sensory phonics

Throughout our original series of storybooks, set in the Phonics Shed garden with Joe as a guide, children are introduced to the 44+ phonemes of the English language and over 300 of the most common Dolch and Fry high-frequency words. Each storybook introduces a new character and its associated phoneme-grapheme correspondence, allowing children to develop in their phonics attainment as they get to know the Phonics Shed characters and progress through the series.

Our read-aloud teaching book series comprises 120 stories which are available to purchase as hard copies and also available digitally via our websites to display on interactive whiteboards or via screen-share for remote teaching.

In addition to our narrative storybook series, we have a set of decodable readers which span the entire range of the program. In these stories, many familiar characters appear but the words are strictly limited to those that are either decodable by the current stage of learning or are explicitly teachable as partially decodable words.

Our curriculum supports Science of Reading research by providing a multi-sensory, explicit, and systematic progression of phonics. The progression begins with identifying and discriminating sounds, moving on to early foundational phonics skills, then to more advanced phonemic patterns, and leads into our complementary Spelling Shed curriculum.

Each phoneme-grapheme correspondence includes:

• A full lesson plan and printable resources
• An original character that represents the new grapheme and phoneme
• A storybook that introduces a new character for every new GPC with accompanying stories
• High-frequency words are integrated into the stories and have their own set of flashcards
• Grapheme flashcards for recall, which also include letter formation phrases for both lowercase and capital letters
• Songs relating to the character and follow a familiar tune
• An action relating to the character, grapheme, and sound
• A selection of activities to incorporate early writing and reading

It is the combination of these elements that makes our curriculum so powerful. The combination of our systematic approach with so many different "hooks" into learning means children's learning is accelerated.

Our Core Curriculum is a classroom teaching resource strongly supported by online and offline games, resources, and tools. Our narrative book series, decodable books, lesson plans, guidance documents, and training videos are available in digital formats which will allow teachers to display them on a variety of devices, including interactive whiteboards and screencasts, for in-school or at-home learning.

Our planning links to a series of new and original games. The games include the nine key pre-school topics from Chapter 1, such as our online body percussion game. Games support the learning progression through each phase (or chapter) with the game sequences progressing and supporting learning of each phoneme-grapheme correspondence in a variety of ways. Children can access the games as part of in-class phonics teaching, and as independent online activities which can be played in school or at home.

As part of all Phonics Shed subscriptions, we provide an easy-to-use assessment tool that acts as a screening for phonics knowledge. The assessment process extends to nonsense words - also called nonwords or pseudowords - and gives detailed reporting to enable teachers to identify gaps in students' phonics knowledge.

Our digital games add another layer of data to the assessment profile, as all in-game responses are automatically marked and populate an intuitive reporting dashboard, allowing teachers to assign personalized online tasks or follow up with one-on-one or small group interventions.