Vera Conway is a special needs teacher who has found her own solutions to teaching reading through one-to-one games based on naive synthetic phonics. She is apparently unaware of the past 20 years of research and debate abut phonics and phonology: for example, she is innocent of notions such as onset and rime, teaching hat rather than hat. The games are limited and repetitive, and the drawings often ambiguous. Yet she gives good advice about pronouncing individual letter sounds without “rogue” additions, and about the importance of children experiencing success.

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