Before the word games start, Pip may teach the sound your child is about to practice. It takes a minute or two, and it follows the order every good phonics lesson follows:
- I do. Pip says the sound, shows the letters that spell it, and blends
three words in front of your child, one sound at a time and then the whole word.
- We do. Your child works through a few words with Pip, including one or
two made-up words, which are the honest test of whether they are using the letters.
- You do. Your child reads a few short sentences and builds a word they
hear.
At the end there are three short questions about what was just taught. There is no score and nothing is counted on the screen, the same as the rest of the word games.
Who writes the lessons
Each lesson is written ahead of time, never while your child is waiting, and never about your child: nothing about them is used to write it. Before any child sees a lesson:
- it is checked so that every word your child is asked to read uses only the
letter sounds they have been taught, plus the heart words (the few words learned by heart, like "said" and "was") they have met;
- it is checked for the sounds of your child's accent, so an American child is
never taught the British vowel in "bath", or told the r in "car" is silent;
- it is checked so it never asks a child to work out a word from a picture or
from the first letter. Children are taught to read the letters, all the way through the word;
- sentences are kept short for your child's age;
- it goes through the same safety checks as a book;
- and then a phonics specialist reads the whole lesson and approves it.
Older children who are still learning a sound get the same teaching written for their age, never a lesson made for a five-year-old.
New lessons, and trying them first
Each month we may write one deeper lesson for each age group, on a topic chosen from what readers across TaleTykes find hardest and from the school calendar. Topics are chosen from totals across many readers, never from any one child's record. A new lesson is checked and approved exactly as above.
Sometimes a new version of a lesson is tried with a small share of children before it replaces the old one, so we can see whether it teaches better. Which children see it is chosen at random, and a child keeps seeing the same version while it is being tried. Both versions have been approved by the specialist.
Sounds and accents
Each lesson is written for American English or British English. Your child gets the lesson for the English they read in: British English if you chose it for them, and American English otherwise. Pip's pure sounds are recordings made by a person and checked by two more, never a computer voice. Until a sound has been recorded, its lesson is shown with the letters and without the recording.
What is kept
The same switch as everything else learned about your child: Learn what they enjoy, on their Safety page.
With it on, and once our privacy notice and notice to parents describe it and you have agreed to them, we keep which lesson your child had, the day, when they started and finished, how many of the three questions they answered and how many were right. Not which answers they chose. It helps us tell when a sound is secure, and whether a lesson teaches well. With it off, the lesson still works and nothing about how it went is written down. Turning it off afterwards deletes it.
What this is not
It is not a reading program on its own and it is not a substitute for school. Our sequence maps to the ones many schools use, such as UFLI Foundations, so a teacher can see where a lesson sits; that is a map, not a claim that we teach the same way. Nothing your child sees here is a test, and nothing you see is a grade.