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Phonics with Sally & Gisela
From this year, all schools in Victoria will be teaching kids how to read using Phonics.
With all this fuss happening at the moment, I chatted with literacy expert Gisela Ervin-Ward, to find out exactly... "What IS Phonics?"
Our conversation covers the science behind how kids learn to read, and what parents can do to best support their child's reading journeys at home.
The teacher-approved School of Monsters phonics workbook can be used to promote school readiness or in conjunction with schoolwork!
There are 44 spoken sounds in English and approximately 200 ways of spelling these sounds.
This pack contains the phonics sounds children will most likely be taught first, and it is designed to help them start learning to read and spell.
School of Monsters: FUN WITH PHONICS is created by Gisela Ervin-Ward, illustrated by Chris Kennett and published by Hardie Grant Children's Publishing.
Preview pages
Q&A with Gisela Ervin-Ward
What is a Specialist Literacy Teacher? When you meet me, I’ll tell you that I teach dyslexic kids how to read, but really, as a Specialist Literacy Teacher, I help all sorts of children develop their reading, spelling, writing, and oral language skills using evidence-based methods based on the Science of Reading.
Why did you choose this profession? I’m also a children’s author and lover of children’s literature, so when I first became a teacher, I wanted to make sure that the kids around me got the chance to love stories as much as I did. I’d been working in developing countries for years with children who didn’t have access to quality, reliable education, let alone printed books, so it was an easy change to become a teacher to make sure that Australian kids got these things. This meant that when we found out our son was dyslexic, it was a big shock to realise that we couldn’t find anyone to provide him with the evidence-based, specialist support he needed. His school wasn’t teaching him in the way he needed to be taught, and we had trouble sourcing the clinical support he needed. I retrained so I could do it myself. It turned out that we weren’t the only ones having trouble working out what to do and where to get help. Despite decades of clear, cognitive research about reading and the brain and the best ways to teach reading based on that, it was hard to find schools anywhere that were comprehensively and consistently teaching that way, let alone people providing clinical support. I very quickly found myself supporting a large number of children and families, firstly in schools and then in private practice. Now after years of experience and training, I mainly work with neurodivergent children and children with learning difficulties. One of my favourite parts of the job is supporting their families to take their own action and seek support from the community.
How can the School of Monsters Phonic kit help teachers in the classroom and parents supporting their child's reading at home? I’m very happy to say that things are beginning to change in literacy education in schools. Many Australian state governments have mandated the use of systematic synthetic phonics to teach reading and spelling. This is great news for our new readers because the well-established research evidence shows that this forms the core of the best way to teach all children how to read. It’s not the only factor in teaching children to read, but it is vital. How School of Monsters Can Help Sally Rippin created the School of Monsters to give parents and children a series of books that could be used as a bridge between the ‘decodable readers’ children use at school and chapter books children read independently. With the widespread introduction of the use of phonics in schools, we saw another way that the Monsters could help and we developed the School of Monsters Fun with Phonics Kit. This kit consists of a set of 70 phonics flashcards and a workbook to help children learn one of the most crucial skills in learning to read: being able to automatically associate a letter with the sound it represents. (Grapheme/Phoneme Correspondence). Grapheme/Phoneme Correspondence (GPC) is the relationship between letters or groups of letters (graphemes) and the sounds they make (phonemes). Basically, it's about matching written symbols to their sounds. This kit doesn’t replace you school’s reading program, instead it give you a fun way to practice one of the most fundamental foundational skills. Cool Features of the Phonics Kit 1. Kids love the illustrations, particularly the characters The illustrations on the reverse of the cards provide a ‘memory hook’ for the sounds if your child needs a hint. Remember, hints are okay—this is learning not a test 2. The vowels and digraphs are different colours to help children recognise that they are different 3. This pack goes beyond just the alphabet sounds. It has the most commonly used vowel digraphs. This is sometimes called the ‘extended code’. 4. The cards have the It has the ‘Silent-e’ digraph and open syllable long vowel sounds School of Monsters Phonics Kit Sneaky Secret There’s a sneaky hidden treasure hunt game in the Phonics Workbook. All the sentences have been taken from the School of Monsters books so if you have an eagle-eyed kid who loves finding all the secret jokes in Wheels and Springs and Moving Things, they might like to try and find which School of Monsters stories the sentences come from.
Can you explain some common terms that teacher and parents are going to start coming across? Technical Terms You Might Hear Phonics: The relationship between letters and the sounds they make. Systematic Synthetic Phonics: Teaching children how to read by teaching them the ‘code’ of English, starting with the smallest part—the sounds—and teaching children how to blend them into words in a systematic order that ensures there aren’t any gaps in a child’s knowledge, and each bit of knowledge builds on the last. The Science of Reading: A body of research based in cognitive science, linguistics and related topics that explains how people learn to read. It holds that reading is a ‘biologically secondary’ skill that must be explicitly taught—humans are not ‘hardwired’ to learn to read by themselves. It shows that that effective reading instruction focuses on teaching skills like phonics, phonological awareness, vocabulary, comprehension, fluency, and oral language through clear, structured methods. The Simple View of Reading: A core theory in the Science of Reading that states that that reading comprehension is the result of two key groups of skills: word recognition (decoding) and language comprehension working together. The Reading Rope: Is another core theory that breaks down ‘word recognition’ and ‘language comprehension’ into smaller parts that makes it easier to understand the complex nature of these two things and therefore helps guide people in assessing and teaching reading. The Big 6 of Reading Six elements of reading and language that should inform literacy lessons. Phonics: The relationship between letters and the sounds they make. Phonological Awareness: The ability to hear and work with sounds in spoken language. Fluency: Reading smoothly, accurately, and with expression. Comprehension: The ability to understand and make sense of what is read. Vocabulary: The collection of words a person knows and understands. Oral Language: The ability to speak and understand spoken language, including the way words work together in sentences.
Author photo by Sister Scout Studio
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Sally Rippin is one of Australia’s highest-selling female author and has written over 100 books for children and young adults, many of them award-winning.
As the current Australian Children's Laureate (2024-2025), Sally is travelling around the country to chat about the ways we can share stories and support children who might struggle to read. Read more.
Discover Sally Rippin's books
We love wayward children in literature. Not so much in life.
When Sally Rippin discovered her child was struggling to read, the best-selling children’s author assumed it would sort itself out over time. She couldn’t have been more wrong. Her son’s dyslexia and ADHD went undiagnosed for years, leaving him further and further behind his peers, and labelled as ‘difficult’ by an education system that couldn’t easily cater to neurodivergent kids. And by the time Sally learned how to advocate for her child, it was – almost – too late.
This extraordinary book for parents is about how we learn to read and what can happen if we don’t, through the eyes of a parent who did everything the wrong way. Through meticulous research, interviews with educational experts and conversations with neurodivergent adults, Rippin shares her brilliant and eye-opening insights into how we can help all kids find the joy in reading, and advocate for them within the limited mainstream schooling system – and maybe even help shift the system entirely. After all, they say school isn’t for everyone, but if everyone must go to school – then why not?
Reviews for Wild Things
'Sally Rippin is one of Australia's most beloved children's authors, but this book is her true gift to parents. Wild Things throbs with love, compassion and, above all, hope for children who happen to find written words really hard.'
– Alice Pung OAM, author of Unpolished Gem
'Wild Things shows what happens in an education system that isn’t built to support different learning styles. This is a must-read for parents, teachers and universities wanting to learn how we can create an inclusive and accessible education system for everyone.'
– Eliza Hull, disability advocate and editor of We've Got This: Stories by Disabled Parents
‘This illuminating, big-hearted, deeply humane book is both essential guide and powerful call to action. A much-needed source of solace and empowerment for any parent with a child who struggles at school, this is also a vital commentary on the desperate need for a better resourced and more inclusive education system. Left me heartbroken, inspired, and fired up to create change for the kids locked out of all that reading brings.’
– Rachel Power, author of The Divided Heart and journalist for the Australian Education Union.
‘[Wild Things] is powerful and informative, full of wonderful tips and evidence-based facts. It’s going to be helpful for everyone – parents and carers, anyone who has been touched by literacy difficulties, at any stage of their life. Our kids do find their way, but as [Sally Rippin has] clearly said, this journey would have been so much easier if our kids had only been given the opportunity to learn to read early in primary school.’
– Heidi Gregory, founder of the Dyslexia Victoria Support Facebook page