MyWordz® technology is used at any age and stage of reading and spelling, to Show the Reading and Spellling Code!
“Understanding that the letters on the page represent the sounds in spoken words underpins successful word reading. Pupils’ knowledge of the English alphabetic code, how letters or groups of letters represent the sounds of the language, supports their reading and spelling.” (Department for Education, 2023)
There are 26 letters in the alphabet, and they are used in different combinations to represent the sounds in spoken English. We think of these letters and letter combinations as pictures of speech sounds. They are known technically as graphemes.
We use at least 44 sounds, known as phonemes, when we speak. Writing gives us a way of representing those sounds on paper.
But there’s a complication. The written system developed to represent particular ways of speaking, and the sounds represented in a word may not exactly match the sounds your child uses in their own accent. We needed to tackle this.
As you start using our approach, you’ll understand why this matters. Don’t worry about understanding it all now.
Everyone who reads and spells well, however they were taught, or even if they seemed to teach themselves, has developed knowledge of this Speech Sound Code.
Because we work with children as young as toddlers, we don’t need to start by using terminology such as phonemes and graphemes. We talk about sounds and pictures of speech sounds. We call the letter or letters that map to a sound in a word Speech Sound Pics®, or Sound Pics® for short.
When reading, skilled readers look at a word and recognise which letters belong together as Sound Pics®, and the sounds they represent.
When spelling, they can hear or think about the sounds in a word and retrieve the letters or strings of letters, the Sound Pics®, that represent those sounds.
Learning to read and spell would be easy if every letter, or string of letters, always represented the same sound. We could look at the letter <a>, for example, and know that it always represented one sound.
But look at these words. The letter a is pronounced differently in all 9 words! This is why we SHOW them the sound using Speech Sound Monsters! aka Phonemies. The Phonemies let children know the sound straught away.
Likewise, spelling would be easy if children listened for sounds and there was only one possible Sound Pic® to represent it.
Imagine if, when chidren heard the sound /s/ the letter used was an s.
If the word is sip it does! But what about these words?
The same Sound Pic® can represent different sounds, and the same sound can be represented by many different Sound Pics®. On top of this, learners may use different sounds in their own speech from those being taught in a phonics programme.
This is where Show the Code™ changes things.
We can show children which letters are graphemes AND their sound values in the word they are trying to read or spell. If they use a different pronunciation because of their accent, they can shift the sounds to match their own speech.
Their brains can then store that relationship between the spoken word and its written form.
And when we show the code, it means you don't have to understand it all! You can learn about word mapping WITH the child.
For children who can form letters and numbers, we also use our 60 Second Spelling Routine to help secure those word-specific mappings.
This can be especially important for 1 in 5 children as they have particular difficulty processing and manipulating the speech sounds in words, and the routine addresses that. The challenges aren't related to intelligence or simply whether they can hear. It relates to speech-sound processing, including phonemic awareness, which plays an important role in learning to read and spell.
What ultimately matters is that children move into the self-teaching phase.
But they don’t have to wait until then to become more independent.
When children are still learning the Core Code and get stuck on a word, they usually need an adult to tell them which letters are the graphemes and the sounds they represent. That means the adult needs to know too. Many parents don’t.
If your child, or student, was stuck on the word 'sugar' would you be sure which letters are the graphemes, and their sound value?
MyWordz® technology can Show the Code™ for both of them. It shows which letters are graphemes AND their sound values, so the child can check the mapping rather than waiting for an adult to know the answer. At the same time, the parent is learning to see the code too.
Every successful mapping helps build the word-mapping knowledge children need for self-teaching.
As that knowledge grows, they increasingly work out and learn unfamiliar words without explicit instruction.
So independence doesn’t start when self-teaching starts. We can support independence while they’re getting there.
That’s the goal of Show the Code™: to help children reach self-teaching as early as possible.
Instead of trying to explicitly teach every possible spelling pattern, we show children how the words they actually want and need to read and spell are mapped.
There’s already an internationally recognised system for representing the sounds of spoken words: the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Phonetic transcription can tell you how a word is pronounced.
We’ve taken this further.
With Phonemies®, our Phonetic Symbols for Kids, children can see the sound values in a word. But MyWordz® doesn’t stop there. It also shows them which letters map to those sounds.
So they can see both sides of the Speech Sound Code:
letters → sounds for reading
The Reading Framework states:
“Understanding that the letters on the page represent the sounds in spoken words underpins successful word reading. Pupils’ knowledge of the English alphabetic code, how letters or groups of letters represent the sounds of the language, supports their reading and spelling.”
(Department for Education, 2023)
sounds → letters for spelling
In spelling, pupils are taught to say a word clearly, segment it into phonemes, and select graphemes to represent each phoneme in writing (Department for Education, Writing Framework, 2025, p. 41).
Statutory spelling guidance further states that teachers should draw pupils’ attention to grapheme–phoneme correspondences that both do and do not fit with what has been taught so far.
We Show the Code™ for reading and spelling, which is why we call this bidirectional word mapping.
We want children to develop decoding and encoding together, rather than thinking of phonics as something they use for reading and spelling as something separate.
For children who find conventional approaches difficult, being able to see the mapping can make something that previously felt mysterious much more explicit. For other children, it can help them become independent earlier.
We run face-to-face workshops, deliver in-house professional development, and are preparing to launch free support groups for parents.
We’ll show you how to use MyWordz® technology to Show the Code™, how to create resources around the words your child actually wants to read and spell, and, if you’re a teacher or tutor following a programme, how to use the technology alongside your existing approach.
It can sit alongside any approach focused on mapping phonemes and graphemes.
In England, this also fits with the DfE emphasis on understanding the correspondences between phonemes and graphemes.
The expectation is:
In reading, pupils are taught to decode by identifying graphemes in written words from left to right, saying the corresponding phonemes, and blending those phonemes to say the whole word (Department for Education, 2023, p. 47).
But what happens when they encounter a grapheme they haven’t been taught yet?
We show them.
They don’t need to wait until a phonics lesson has covered that grapheme, and they don’t need an adult beside them who already knows the mapping. MyWordz® can show them which letters are the graphemes and their sound values.
In spelling, pupils are taught to say a word clearly, segment it into phonemes, and select graphemes to represent each phoneme in writing (Department for Education, Writing Framework, 2025, p. 41).
But what happens when they can hear or identify the phoneme but don’t yet know which grapheme represents it in that word?
Again, we show them.
They don’t need to wait until that grapheme has been explicitly taught, and they don’t need an adult to know the answer. MyWordz® can show them the mapping.
Statutory spelling guidance states that teachers should draw pupils’ attention to grapheme–phoneme correspondences that both do and do not fit with what has been taught so far.
But a teacher or parent won’t always be there at the moment a child needs that information. And even when they are, they may not know the mapping themselves. MyWordz® technology can Show the Code™ for them.
You can give children technology that makes the Speech Sound Code visible and gives ALL children a quicker route towards using it for themselves.
Less Teaching. More Guided Self-Teaching.
Word Mapping Matters: Show the Code™.
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