SOS Therapy and Learning Centre

Meet ’The Decoding Dragon’ to keep the ‘Guessing Monster’ away! An excellent resource to combat the use of these cute looking ‘Clue Cards’ with animals and strategies to help early readers but the ‘Clues’ all encourage children to guess the word eg. “Eagle Eye: Look at the picture for clues to what the word might be”. This is a very popular resource being used in Western Australian primary schools, but each of the 7 strategies on this particular version of the ‘Clue Cards’ encourage children to guess words rather than use the ONE Strategy they actually need - Decode the Word. Say the sounds as you point to them with your finger and blend those sounds together all the way to the end of the word, break longer words into syllables. * Please share this post with everyone who works in education with both the ‘Clue Cards’ that shouldn’t be used in teaching literacy plus the ‘Decoding Dragon’ with evidence based reading strategies that don’t rely on guessing.
* Links to websites with evidence based structured synthetic phonics resources, resources using the Science of Reading will be provided in the comment section below.
Clare Catmore Principal Speech Pathologist SOS Therapy and Learning Centre