The literacy spine
Reading is where a home-educating family is most exposed and most alone. It is also the part of education where the evidence is least ambiguous — which makes being vague about it indefensible rather than merely weak. So here is exactly what we do, in order.
That is the Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986), and the word that matters is times. A product, not a sum. If either one is zero, the answer is zero — a child who decodes perfectly but understands nothing is not reading, and neither is a child who understands everything read to them but cannot get words off a page.
It is why we refuse to trade one against the other. A phonics-only program is exactly as broken as a comprehension-only one. It just takes longer to notice.
Woven together rather than taught in sequence — the strand model comes from Scarborough's Reading Rope (2001). Each one names where it carries the most weight, but none of them expires: a nine-year-old who cannot decode still needs the phonics strand, and we are not going to tell that family they missed their chance.
Noticing that spoken words are built from separate sounds — hearing the three sounds in c-a-t before any letters are involved.
It is oral, not written. A child who cannot hear that 'ship' starts with /sh/ cannot be taught which letters spell it, so this runs slightly ahead of the letters and never behind them.
Learning which letters spell which sounds, in a deliberate order, and blending them to read words that have never been seen before.
This is the strand that makes a reader independent. Everything else can be given to a child by an adult reading aloud; this cannot.
Reading accurately, at a comfortable pace, with expression — so that attention is free for meaning instead of being spent on the words.
Accuracy is not enough. A child decoding every word correctly but slowly has no working memory left for comprehension, and looks like they have a comprehension problem when they do not.
Building the store of words a child knows, and the habit of taking unfamiliar words apart — prefixes, suffixes, base words.
Morphology is where vocabulary stops being a list and becomes a system. A child who knows what 'un-' and '-able' do can read words nobody has ever taught them.
Understanding, questioning and arguing with what has been read — and noticing when it has stopped making sense.
Comprehension is not a single skill that can be drilled. It rides on knowledge of the world, so this strand is deliberately tied to the science and HASS units rather than taught on disconnected passages.
Forming letters, then sentences, then whole texts — with spelling taught as the same code being used in the other direction.
Spelling and phonics are one body of knowledge, not two subjects. Teaching them apart is why so many children can read a word they cannot spell and never find out why.
The order is the whole intervention. These letters taught in any order are just letter teaching; taught in this order, every step can be read using only what came before — which is what lets a child succeed on their own instead of guessing from the picture.
s, a, t, p, i, n comes first for a reason: a child who knows those six can read sat, pin, tap, nip on the first day — real words, by blending, not by memorising shapes.
By the end: Simple three-sound words by blending: sat, pin, dog, lock.
By the end: Words with two letters making one sound: ship, chat, ring, thin.
By the end: Words where a vowel sound is spelled with two letters: rain, night, coat, farm.
By the end: Longer words without new letter-sounds: stamp, splash, sandpit.
By the end: Most single-syllable words, and a strategy for choosing between spellings.
By the end: Unfamiliar multisyllabic words, taken apart rather than guessed.
The reading science does not stop at a border, so the strands are identical everywhere. What changes is the paperwork. In most states the Australian Curriculum v9 codes we attach to each strand are exactly what your assessor reads. In New South Wales they are not — NSW is assessed against NESA syllabus outcomes. In Western Australia there are no content-description codes to cite at all.
We tell you which of those you are in, rather than letting you find out from your registrar.
We do not claim your guest will read by any particular birthday, and we publish no effect size for this program because we have not run a trial of it. Systematic synthetic phonics has strong evidence behind it — the National Reading Panel (2000), the Rose Review (2006), and Australia's own National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy (Rowe et al., 2005). That evidence is for the approach. It is not a promise about a child.
If reading is not coming, that is a reason to see someone — not to buy a longer program. Our Learning Start consultation is with a registered teacher, counsellor or psychologist, and telling you to get assessed is an answer we are willing to give.
