Teaching children to guess is not teaching reading!

We're hearing from many parents struggling to help their children learn to read in lockdown.

Unfortunately, many parents are being encouraged to use methods such as the Three Cueing System. Our colleagues at Five from Five offer an excellent summary and video about the problems with this approach here The video below explains this issue well.

As explained by Five from Five, "Skipping a word, looking at a picture, or trying a word that makes sense are all strategies that encourage guessing". Teaching kids to guess or predict is not teaching reading.

There is a better way. It is simple and straightforward - it is called Systematic Synthetic Phonics. You can read more about this and find some great resources in a blog we posted in July here.