Our Clients

Teachers:
literacy co-ordinators, classroom teachers and learning support staff value the simplicity of Little Learners Love Literacy® and the pedagogy of explicit and sequential teaching with lots of application, practice and revision. The extremely positive feedback from teachers and the results they are achieving with their students keeps us afloat. Teachers use the Little Learner Pip and Tim books in the classroom and for home reading. This ensures that what is being taught in the classroom is practised at home by the child reading to their family. These books are our secret ingredient!

We call them the no tricks books. We do not want children looking at pictures to guess when reading. This is not reading! We want children to be able to ‘sound out’ or ‘decode’ all the graphemes in the word. Teachers appreciate the training on why and how to use Little Learners Love Literacy® offered by the Australian Council of Educational Research (ACER) in Camberwell.

Laura Sammut sent us this email:

I started teaching with Little Learners in Term 2 last year. I teach Prep in a low socio economic area in the South East of Melbourne. At the beginning of the year the majority of our Prep students did not recognise any letters of the alphabet, let alone know the sounds that those letters made. For many of these children, English was a second language. After some investigation into literacy programs, we decided to give Little Learners a go and I’m so glad that we did.At first I was hesitant because it went against everything I was taught at University. I got rid of all my sight words and ‘reading’ strategy cards and followed the LLLL curriculum exactly.  By the end of Term 3 I was blown away by our results. We were doing weekly spelling tests and we had children spelling words like ‘splash’ and ‘train’ and doing it with confidence and ease. It made me so proud to see how far their decoding and encoding skills had come.At the end of the year the results were phenomenal. 95% of my class had automatic recall of all 26 letters of the alphabet and their sounds, without using cued articulation as a reminder. 50% of my grade were reading words much more difficult than CVC words – and actually reading them. None of this looking at the picture and first and last letter and taking a stab in the dark.

They were able to segment and blend 5-6 sounds in a word including digraphs and trigraphs! I could not believe that the children who started the year knowing zero sounds could decode and read words like dentist, finger and starling.

Their benchmark reading levels were even more impressive. 29% reached level 10 or above by November and 12% reached level 16 or above. They absolutely smashed the level 5 benchmark for Preps. I was so proud to see these children actually READING these books and not just looking at the pictures and guessing a word that would make sense. I could not teach Literacy any other way now. I really am a synthetic phonics convert!

Synthetic Phonics is a term used in UK which means ‘synthesizing sounds’ –  blending them together.  Little Learners Love Literacy is a synthetic phonics program.

Speech Pathologists:  
understand the importance of oral language and the link to literacy.  Their training is very focused on phonemic awareness and this naturally links to phonics and the teaching of reading and spelling.

SoundCheck , sequencing sounds for spelling success is one of their favourite resources.

Parents: love the sequential and explicit teaching of our program.  It makes sense to them.  Once children know a few phonemes (sounds) and graphemes (letters) they can start reading the Pip and Tim books.  Their children are starting on the important journey of reading.  It is simple and fun! We believe that all children can learn to read ...