Speedie Readies: Show the Code! The online library of One, Two, Three and Away! books is located at SpeedieReadies.com
Activity 2: Moving Pupils into Self-Teaching to Read with Greater Fluency and Comprehension
The Village with Three Corners and Word Mapping Mastery® : Rediscovering a Classic
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Sheila K. McCullagh was a British author renowned for her contributions to children’s literature, particularly educational reading schemes. Born on 3 December 1920 in Surrey, she began her career as a lecturer at Leeds University in the 1950s and later taught at a teacher’s college in London, Ontario. After 1963 she devoted herself to writing and went on to publish more than 300 titles, including Puddle Lane, Tim and the Hidden People, and The Village with Three Corners (also known as One, Two, Three and Away!). Her stories combined imaginative settings with a clear purpose: to help young children become readers.
My mother taught infants in the 1980s and used The Village with Three Corners every day. Her classroom was a place of singing, play, and conversation, with reading and writing woven through it all. The books were central to that environment, and their characters became part of children’s lives. Inspired by those memories, I trained as an early years teacher. When I began teaching, a headteacher advised me to avoid the series in favour of “rich literature,” but I chose to keep it. By the end of the year, all but two of my pupils were fluent readers who loved Roger Red-Hat and his friends. They were also confident, articulate individuals who loved to discusse the characters and who had spent many hours discussing 'real life'.
“The children in the books are not always ‘good’ or ‘successful’ and the boys and girls do not always play together in perfect accord.”
“The adults are not always helpful and kindly.”
“The reality in the book lies in the experiences of childhood and the feelings of the children”
According to Berenice Nygaard in Children's Literature and Moral Understanding (2009), books featuring characters with both positive and negative traits allow children to explore the concept that people are multi-dimensional. This exploration can foster more nuanced moral reasoning. Once Alfie - who is autistic - started to explore the books we learnt so much more about him too. This matters. He is not just decoding more easily; he is predicting and inferring, and experiencing pleasure in getting to know the characters. He is not keen on Percy Green, who can be ‘naughty’, as Alfie has a strong moral compass. Being able to talk about things such as people not always being ‘good’ has been invaluable for him, as it was something that once made him feel very anxious.
Mapping the Code for Modern Classrooms
The new edition of The Village with Three Corners Teacher Handbook has been revised for Word Mapping Mastery® (WMM) to support the republication of One, Two, Three and Away! by The Reading Hut Ltd. It explains why these stories deserve renewed attention. McCullagh displayed striking insight into how children learn to read, anticipating principles that were only formalised two decades later when Linnea Ehri described orthographic mapping theory.
McCullagh understood that successful reading instruction requires the growth of a sight vocabulary, where words are stored for instant recognition through repeated encounters. She also included phonics instruction, as this handbook shows, but without detracting from the purpose of learning to read She did not yet know that to benefit from any type of word-mapping instruction, such as phonics, children must first be able to perceive and process the individual speech sounds in words. However only a small number of children needed this explicit instruction - which the Ten Minutes a Day, With a TA, offers on a 1:1 basis. This will be no more than 20% of the reception class.
This insight matters because it explains why two children in my own first class did not learn to read despite being able and motivated. The scheme provides everything needed for at least three in four children to achieve independent reading, but those two pupils lacked the phonemic awareness required to connect letters and sounds and so could not reach the self-teaching stage. They needed explicit help to “see” how letters and sounds connect, without detaching from the central focus of reading for pleasure. The Speedie Readies system facilitates this. Indeed, in the future, teachers may consider starting with the 10-Day Speech Sound Play Plan before introducing whole class phonics, and using the Village with Three Corners with the whole classs from term 2 of reception, and only the 20% need 1:1 word mapping (phonics) support. The others simply learn the GPCs needed to pass the PSC by using the Monster Spelling Piano app.
The Role of Speedie Readies and Technology
When phonemic awareness is secure, and children know the Green and Purple Code Level Phonemies®, they can begin the readers. They continue to work with the GPCs, but the readers bring everything together and enable self-teaching within a term.
Word mapping and technology now allow every child, including those who struggle with phonics or speech sound processing, to join in fully. Mapping does not change the nature of the books. It removes barriers so that no child is excluded from the experience McCullagh intended.
The first 52 books are mapped to make the speech–print connections visible. After that, children use technology to check words independently, while teachers and TAs focus on discussion, storytelling, and comprehension. These are the true purposes of the books.
This system facilitates decoding mastery and fluency, preparing children for comprehension and the joy of reading. It also reflects the principles outlined in the Curriculum and Assessment Review (DfE, 2025), which calls for curriculum coherence, inclusion, oracy, and mastery.
→ Read how Speedie Readies supports the Review’s recommendations.
Why Now
Unfortunately, when the Department for Education mandated synthetic phonics programmes in 2013, much of what had been effective was set aside. Reading-for-pleasure levels have since declined more sharply in England than in any comparable nation. The most recent Review continues to support this model, despite evidence that one in four children is still not thriving.
While systematically taught phonics is useful for all and crucial for some, the “how” of instruction is not settled science (Wyse & Bradbury, 2022). The same children with weak speech-sound processing are now being failed in greater numbers.
Also, many children with good phonemic awareness were able to engage with predictable texts and repetitive high-frequency words, even without explicit instruction, and their recoding through sef-teaching combined with motivation to read carried them forward.
When Sir Jim Rose called for change, he noted that 16 per cent of children could not read at the expected level by age eleven (Rose, 2006). Since the introduction of synthetic phonics and standardised Key Stage 2 reading tests in 2016, that figure has remained at around 25 per cent. We need to go back to what was working, and fill in the gaps - it should not have been discarded in the first place.
A Return to a Focus on Phonics, Fluency, Vocabulary Knowledge and Comprehension
The One, Two, Three and Away! handbook provides an overview of how to use the scheme, including the book sequence and recommended activities. This fourth edition, adapted to facilitate Word Mapping Mastery®, supports reading fluency for at least 95 per cent of children within the neurodiverse classroom. It retains what worked, while adding what was missing: explicit phoneme–grapheme mapping and technology to support inclusion for all learners. A TA can work with children on a 1:1 basis - especially for those children who do not start school with good phonemic awareness and good vocabulary knowledge.
By combining McCullagh’s timeless insight with modern speech–sound mapping and MyWordz® technology, we can help a new generation of children achieve what hers once did - fluency, comprehension, and joy in reading.
Emma Hartnell-Baker MEd SEN
Neurodivergent Reading Whisperer
References
Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. Routledge.
Rose, J. (2006). Independent review of the teaching of early reading: Final report. Department for Education and Skills. https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/5551/2/report.pdf
Wyse, D., & Bradbury, A. (2022). Reading wars or reading reconciliation? Cambridge Journal of Education, 52(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/0305764X.2021.1976312
No More Wait to Fail
Prevention is far easier than remediation /
intervention.
Although the Ten Minutes With a TA Speedie Readies system focuses on upstream dyslexia risk screening and prevention of intervention, and the TA works through the first 36 pre-readers to re-route learning by creating new neural pathways for phonemic awareness, the TA can also reference The Village with Three Corners Teacher Handbook, revised for Word Mapping Mastery. This early prevention system supports the development of both phonemic awareness and orthographic knowledge, ensuring that children link the sounds they hear to the written words they see and understand how the English code works in real reading contexts. They love the stories! This means that reading, writing and spelling has a purpose, and they are intrinsically motivated to learn more.
Through this process, the TA gains valuable insight into the learning journey of neurodivergent children and recognises how print-to-speech word mapping (decoding) can sometimes hinder progress without this additional layer of support. This one-to-one intervention provides the individualised input that teachers cannot feasibly deliver to every child within a whole-class setting.
The system can also be used as a stand-alone oracy programme. However, the purpose of using One, Two, Three and Away! is to demonstrate that it is possible to meet all key early literacy outcomes through two core activities: Core Phonics (content assessed within the PSC) supported by the Monster Spelling Piano app, and the combined development of Phonemic Awareness, Phonics (the full code), Fluency, Vocabulary Knowledge, Comprehension, and Oracy through The Village with Three Corners series. This links with the recommendations from Becky Francis and team.
English has an opaque orthography
English has an opaque orthography, meaning that the relationship between speech sounds (phonemes) and written symbols (graphemes) is complex and often inconsistent. Unlike transparent orthographies such as Finnish or Italian, where each phoneme maps predictably to a single grapheme, English contains multiple ways to represent the same sound, as well as graphemes that change sound value depending on context.
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This opacity reflects the deep historical layering of English, which incorporates Anglo-Saxon, French, and Latin influences. As a result, learners cannot rely on one-to-one phoneme–grapheme correspondence alone. They must instead develop flexible mapping skills that allow them to recognise, retrieve, and store these variable patterns within the orthographic lexicon.
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For children learning to read and spell, this means that phonological awareness is necessary but not sufficient. They must also learn to connect speech sounds to print through explicit word mapping, noticing how the same sound can appear in different spellings and how the same grapheme can represent multiple sounds. They see this in the stories.
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In an opaque orthography, achieving orthographic mapping therefore depends on making the full code visible and supporting both directions of learning: from print to speech and from speech to print. The Speedie Readies system makes these relationships explicit through the use of Phonemies® and mapped text, allowing children to see, hear, and understand the grapho-phonemic structure of ALL words as they learn to decode and encode with accuracy. As they learn on a 1:1 basis they get what they need, when they need it! Many children’s names demonstrate this opaque orthography, containing grapheme–phoneme correspondences (GPCs) that are not taught within their whole-class synthetic phonics programme, or not until much later in the sequence, and often including the schwa. When the code is made visible, children can understand the mapping early on.
Lara is demonstrating the Monster Spelling Routine, which is an activity the TA can choose to teach during the pilot if they wish. They will have access to the resources and guidance through the SpeedieReadies.com member site, but this is not a planned activity within the pilot.
The aim is to help TAs build confidence gradually rather than feel overloaded, while also giving them the opportunity to shine and take ownership of their role in supporting early literacy.
This gives an insight into the universal code within English’s opaque orthography that skilled readers often forget exists.
The most powerful mechanism for eventually accessing words by sight is use of the graphophonemic structure, a process that amalgamates the word’s units into memory (Ehri, 1978). We could not possibly teach all 350+ grapheme–phoneme correspondences directly. The Speedie Readies system is designed to move every child into the self-teaching phase, where they can uncover and consolidate the full code through reading. Research shows that children shown high frequency words with full graphophonemic analysis are better able earlier on to analogise from those words to new words. Although we can show children mapped wordss individually, as seen in the videos, they must read them within the context of sentences and books. It is critical that young children understand that reading high-frequency words enables them to unlock meaning within interesting texts so that they want to read more, for the sake of reading. This is why the Village With Three Corners series is so important.
We prevent the dyslexia paradox by showing the code, for ALL words.
In 2021 I shared this with the teachers I was supporting in Australia. We had found that when children reached the end of the Yellow Code Level, they could continue with their decodable readers but also begin the PM levelled readers. All teachers were required to complete PM Benchmark assessments each term.
We found that when children reached the end of the Purple Code Level they could start these readers, especially when the text was mapped with Phonemies. The books are repetitive and predictable at first, and the children enjoyed them as part of a series, unlike F&P or PM levelled readers.