Program Overview

The Beanstalk Books programme provides complete continuity for
teachers through its fidelity to the original Letters & Sounds framework and
progression. It is one of the only validated programmes to extend
from Year 0 to Year 3 (Phases 1 to 6), and is the most comprehensive
program with over 650 decodable readers and 2000 pages of daily
lessons. Further, it extends Letters & Sounds through innovative
supplementary resources, such as speech marks (for phonemes) and
sound buttons (for graphemes). All resources are designed to work
alongside daily lessons with simple layouts to make learning easy and fun.
There is a focus on handwriting formation and strong emphasis on Heart
Words or Common Exception Words. Common Exception Words (CEWs)
have been ordered in their own progression, which runs parallel to the
letter progression. This allows for multiple CEWs to be presented with
different spelling patterns but similar phonemes so that children can see
the exception components as well as the decodable components. Children
are empowered to phonemically analyse new words from their grapheme-
to-phoneme knowledge and to identify irregular elements as they occur.
The programme is comprehensive. It has the largest collection of
decodable readers and supplementary resources – all following the
progression. According to the Science of Reading, ‘the books are engaging
and well put together – children will really like them.’ Overall, the Letters &
Sounds Teacher Planners offer a complete systematic synthetic phonics
(SSP) program that provides children with the best opportunities for
progressing to reading fluency, spelling proficiency and a love of literacy.