This fourth edition of the teacher handbook has been adapted to support the ‘mapping’ of the pre-readers and introductory books for neurodivergent learners, and subsequent republication of One, Two, Three and Away! by The Reading Hut Ltd. It explains why these stories deserve renewed attention within the neurodiverse classroom.

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 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.

This insight matters because it explains why two children in my own first class did not learn to read despite being able and motivated. At the time I did not understand what was missing from my support.

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.
 
This handbook will retain what worked but add to it.

Let's get ALL children reading for pleasure, early!

Emma Hartnell-Baker MEd SEN