FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
The term structured literacy has been trademarked by the International Dyslexia Association. The IDA defines structured literacy as the “highly explicit, systematic teaching of foundation skills such as decoding and spelling skills, as well as explicit teaching of other important components of literacy such as vocabulary, comprehension, and writing”. Structured literacy is an approach to teaching oral and written language. It’s based on the science of how children learn to read.
A structured literacy approach prepares students to decode words in an explicit and systematic manner.
There is a carefully planned sequence of teaching that is constructed in a logical sequence from simple to complex objectives. Students are taught the content and skills to be learned using clear, unambiguous lan-guage. Teacher modelling and teacher guidance is followed by scheduled opportunities for practice.
A Scope and Sequence is a summary of what is to be taught, the sequence in which it will be taught and the curriculum outcomes that may be addressed in the intended learning.
A Scope and Sequence is important because it provides an outline for a logical, sequential and cumulative program. It builds on grapheme-phoneme knowledge from simple to complex.
You can download the Sunshine Phonics Scope and Sequence here.
Decodable books are designed to support a Synthetic Phonics method of teaching reading. In Synthetic Phonics, letter sounds (phonemes) and the letters that represent them (graphemes) are taught explicitly and systematically. In decodable books, the text is controlled by and limited to the phonemes that have been taught to that point. For example, the first set of books may be based on children only needing to know the sounds for s a t p i n m d. Only words using these sounds would be used in this set of books (apart from a limited number of very common ‘tricky words’ such as ‘I’ and ‘the’, which are not decodable). In this way, children are able to practise their growing phonic knowledge by reading books that are almost 100% decodable for them.
A tricky word (also called a common exception word) is a word that is very common in the English language, but is not decodable using phonics alone. Children must be taught to recognise these words on sight, because they can’t use the phonics they know to sound them out. Some tricky words become decodable later on, when the relevant phonemes and graphemes have been taught. Sometimes only parts of a word are tricky, and the rest of the word is decodable.
Let’s look at an example. The word the is usually introduced very early in beginning reading texts because it is a high-frequency word that appears a lot in English texts. It is one of the glue words that helps to bind a sentence and story together. It is just a small word of only three letters, but from a decoding point of view, it offers some challenges that make it tricky at the early stages of reading. All sounds in the word the will not have been taught to children yet. These sounds are the digraph /th/ (two letters, one sound), which makes a voiced and unvoiced sound, but in this case it is the voiced, and the letter e, which in this case represents an unstressed vowel, the schwa sound /ə/.
Our Glossary of Key Structured Literacy Terms helps to explain the language used when discussing structured literacy. Download the Glossary here.
The English curriculum is being refreshed and is in draft format at present. It will be ready to use in 2025. From 2025 all state schools in Aotearoa New Zealand will teach reading using a structured literacy approach.
The Sunshine Phonics Decodables programme uses a structured literacy approach to teaching. The 180 books in Series 1 and 2 follow a sequential scope and sequence to teach the 44 phonemes of English.
Year 1: teach simple code using Sets 1-3 of Series 1 and 2
Year 2: teach complex code using Sets 4 and 5 of Series 1 and 2; and consolidate blending of adjacent consonants using Sets 6 and 7 of Series 2
Year 3: teach extended code using Sets 6-7 of Series 1 and Sets 8-11 of Series 2
This programme will also be available digitally in 2025.
Sunshine Next Steps Decodables consists of 36 decodable chapter books – adventure stories about a group of children called Team Turbo – providing great practice using all the phonemes and alternative graphemes taught in the Sunshine Phonics Decodable programme. The books also contain fun raps to support fluency, a text type focus and a glossary in every book.
Intervention – Sunshine Reading Road decodable books are high interest/low ability books, suitable for students needing extra support. They are relatable for older students. The series consists of 50 books, both fiction and non-fiction (includes chapter books and graphic novels).
Assessment can take many forms and we provide a free downloadable comprehensive Assessment Kit with a range of tools that assess four different areas. The Kit also contains two optional Tracker Spreadsheets (Excel format). The Trackers can be used to record assessment results from either Series 1 or Series 2, and to monitor students’ progress.
The Kit contains the following four assessments.
Screening Tests – quickly screen students to place them at the correct stage of the Sunshine Decodables series.
Phonics Assessment – comprehensive tests to assess students’ understanding of new phonemes and graphemes, ability to segment and blend decodable words and to read tricky words.
Assessment of Reading Accuracy – unseen texts to assess students’ reading accuracy.
Comprehension Assessment – questions on the unseen texts.
The Sunshine Phonics Decodables Programme Teachers’ Books also include the phonics assessment sheets.
The Phonics Overview for Series 1 and Series 2 are virtually identical. However, Series 2 takes a slightly slower pace. The Phonics Overviews are available here for Series 1 and 2.
Sunshine Phonics is an evidence-based, structured, synthetic phonics program which is aligned with the latest Science of Reading and Science of Learning research. Through systematic, explicit phonics instruction, students learn the foundational alphabetic code-breaking skills that are essential for success in reading, writing and spelling.
Research from around the world, over several decades and from various disciplines has informed us more about how the human brain functions and what the best high-impact practices are for effective teaching and learning – in particular, teaching reading.
The evidence tells us that to be effective, the teaching of reading should be explicit, systematic and cumulative with a strong focus on phonemic awareness and phonics in the early stages. Teaching needs to follow a scope and sequence (a summary of what is taught and when) that provides a clear progression for students to develop their knowledge of the relationship between letters (graphemes) and sounds (phonemes), so that they can then apply this developing knowledge to reading (decoding) suitably matched decodable texts.
There are six essential elements to being a successful reader known as the ’Big 6’ (Konza 2014): Oral Language, Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Fluency Vocabulary and Comprehension. In the early years, students need to be explicitly taught phonics and phonemic awareness so that they learn the 44 speech sounds of English (phonemes) and the letter/s that represent those sounds (graphemes). Using this knowledge students are taught how to segment and blend these sounds to read words (decode). Decodable books provide the perfect tools for students to practise and apply their developing phonic knowledge.
In the back of all the Sunshine Phonics Decodable Series books there is a teaching overview addressing these key areas and explicit lesson plans are available in the printed Teachers’ Books.