The Reading Hut®
"On a mission to inspire every child to read, learn, and find joy in words. To achieve this, we must stop making learning to map words so difficult for so many."
The Reading Hut Book Store
The Reading Hut is bringing The Story People back to UK nurseries and schools through our Speech Sound Play Plan!
My mother was the infants teacher every child wanted: genuinely interested in them as individuals, caring, and always going the extra mile to meet their learning needs. She played the piano, taught everyone the recorder, and there was daily singing and rhyming. She began every Monday morning with their weekend news, read a story at the end of each day, listened to every child read almost daily, and encouraged plenty of free play.
There was always a dress-up area and an ever-changing home corner—sometimes a shop, café, or post office. She had a craft and box-work space set up where children could grab an apron and a pot of glue or paint and create freely, without direction. She used The Village With Three Corners to teach across the curriculum. Within the series, children would dress up and act out the stories, count change and solve real-life maths problems in the village shop, write letters to the characters and post them in the class post box, draw maps of the Village Square, and much more.
Every child left her Reception class as a reader. Every single one.
She passed away last year, and I am so glad I tracked down and obtained the print rights to the series so I could honour her and the way we used to be able to teach four- to six-year-olds, with talking, play, and stories at the heart of everything we did. I became an early years teacher because of her. And I am excited to bring back The Story People, to be used within the Peg Play Talk Therapy (PPTT) Approach
Emma Hartnell-Baker
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1,2,3 and Away! Book Shop
When I first graduated and set out to inspire children to not just learn to read but to be 'readies'—devouring books like chocolate—I was told by the head teacher not to use a 'scheme' and simply immerse children in rich literature. I wasn't prepared to leave such an important skill to chance, so I ignored her wishes. As teachers, we often have to do this—they are in our care, and we care! Almost all my students were readers by the time they moved up to Year 1, in stark contrast to the children in the other infants' class.
When I started to develop my own 'linguistic' phonics approach in Australia, I knew when children were ready for more than just decodable books aligned with phonics. However, I couldn't find a series that would inspire children to engage in stories. Having had such success with "The Village with Three Corners," I set out on a mission to make The Reading Hut Ltd the proud publishers of this series, bringing it back into the hands of budding readers. My persistence paid off.
Please do reach out if you can help me get these books into libraries for free access to all children. It costs a lot to print, but libraries can stock them!
Emma Hartnell-Baker Support@TheReadingHut.com
We SHOW the Code: Graphemes (Sound Pics®) are presented through Code Mapping®, and Phonemes are represented via Monster Mapping® using Phonemies. This approach is designed for learners who simply want to reach the 'reading for pleasure and meaning' stage as quickly as possible, and for parents and teachers who —and for parents and teachers who want to explore rich content, not phonics in isolation. New to word mapping? Start with Speech Sound Play - Letters and Sounds Phase 1with Phonemies.
Please support free dyslexia screening for the children who need it most - visit DyslexiaBaby.com
Emma Hartnell-Baker aka The Neurodivergent Reading Whisperer is an SEN specialist who champions the prevention of language and literacy difficulties and is a passionate advocate for children with speech, language, and communication needs (SLCN). At the recent World Literacy Summit, she shared practical examples of how to screen toddlers for early signs of dyslexia risk.
The Reading Hut Ltd: Empowering Parents and Teachers to Immerse Neurodiverse Learners in Spoken and Written Word Mapping for Easier, Purpose-Driven Reading & Spelling
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Mission
At The Reading Hut®, our mission is to train and empower teachers to ensure that every child can learn to read and spell proficiently. We address a crucial gap in literacy education: many teachers struggle to map words due to orthographic interference and lack the phonemic awareness needed to teach reading effectively. Our goal is to equip teachers with the skills and tools necessary to guide every child toward literacy success.
The Problem
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Teacher Knowledge Gaps: Many educators face challenges when mapping words for their students, due to a lack of training past synthetic phonics programme GPCs and also orthographic interference—where their understanding of spelling patterns interferes with their ability to focus on phonemes (speech sounds) in words.
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Lack of Phonemic Awareness: 1 in 4 children lack the phonemic awareness on school entry necessary to learn to read, and most adults—teachers included—are unaware of their own limitations in this area.
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The current literacy crisis in the UK is alarming, with 25% of children unable to read proficiently by the end of primary school. This affects their future education and life opportunities.
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Challenges for Neurodivergent Students: Children with learning difficulties, particularly those with dyslexia, struggle significantly when educators aren't equipped with the right tools to support their phonemic awareness development.
Our Solution
The Reading Hut Ltd offers a comprehensive solution by training teachers to:
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Map Words Effectively: Our training programmes help educators understand the phonemic structure of language and overcome orthographic interference. They get excited about the possibilities Mapped Words® offer!
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Build Phonemic Awareness: We provide teachers with tools and resources to enhance their own phonemic awareness, allowing them to teach reading with greater confidence.
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Use Innovative Screeners: Our Phonemic Awareness Screener helps teachers identify children at risk of reading difficulties before formal phonics instruction begins.
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Facilitate orthographic mapping by making the correspondences between letters and sounds easier for ALL children to understand from day 1.
Our programmes are practical, research-driven, and designed to meet the needs of modern educators who are tasked with teaching NextGen children! We focus on:
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Overcoming Orthographic Interference: We teach educators how to focus on the letters and sounds in words—key to teaching children to read and spell.
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Phonemic Awareness Mastery: Our training ensures that teachers build strong phonemic awareness, helping them support all students, especially neurodivergent or learners of concern.
Although Emma Hartnell-Baker's doctoral research is ongoing, it directly informs our approach to Word Mapping Mastery At The Reading Hut Ltd we are focused on understanding how issues such as orthographic interference affects teachers' ability to map words, which is a critical factor in teaching reading, particularly for children with dyslexia.