Science of Reading – Programme Overview

The science of reading is a comprehensive body of multi-disciplinary research across education, psychology and cognitive neuroscience. This research provides a deep understanding of how we learn to read, the skills involved and the parts of the brain that are responsible. The science of reading has demystified how we learn to read and shows how teaching by whole word memorization is limited. Overall, the science of reading provides an evidence-based practice approach for the teaching of Letters & Sounds. Most reading difficulties can be prevented by following this approach involving intensive phonemic awareness training, systematic synthetic phonics and opportunities for repeated practice of common exception words. Children will subsequently receive sufficient training in decoding and encoding, and apply their newly developing skills through decodable texts.

The Junior Learning Science of Reading Programme extends from Year 0 to Year 3 (Phases 1 to 6), and follows a systematic synthetic phonics progression. Common Exception Words (CEWs) have been ordered in their own progression, which runs parallel to the letter progression. This allows for multiple CEWs to be presented with different spelling patterns but similar phonemes so that children can see the exception components as well as the decodable components. Children are empowered to phonemically analyse new words from their grapheme-to-phoneme knowledge and to identify irregular elements as they occur.

The programme is comprehensive. It has the largest collection of decodable readers and supplementary resources – all following the progression. The books are engaging and well put together – children will really like them. Overall, Junior Learning Science of Reading offers a complete systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) programme that provides children with the best opportunities for progressing to reading fluency, spelling proficiency and a love of literacy.