Our passion is helping kids to become better readers. Kids love engaging stories with interesting characters. Having both worked in schools we knew there just wasn’t enough highly structured, decodable texts that were fun for kids. Julia became frustrated in her search for readers for her students and decided to write her own.  This passion project started at the beginning of 2020 and finally she has published her first series of readers -- the Tummy Bug Series.

Tummy Bug follows the story of a sick snail.  It is full of fun for kids to enjoy including farting and spewing. The intention of the series is to provide engaging readers that teach vowel graphemes systematically and slowly, with repeated practice of previously introduced graphemes in following books.  The books introduce all Phase 3 vowel graphemes from the Letters and Sounds strategy.

The Tummy Bug series presumes students have the basic sound letter knowledge (26 letters and their single sounds) as well as consonant digraphs (e.g. ch, sh, ng).  Students need to be able to blend four sound words to have success reading this series.  This series introduces the extended vowel code one at a time and revises previously introduced vowel graphemes in later books of the series.  The readers include some long words, and these are helpfully chunked at the bottom of page.  The workbook provides additional practice and support for chunking, giving students practice at identifying suffixes, as well as practice at chunking compound words as well as words that have two and three syllables.  

Because the story is engaging and illustrations appealing to both young and older children they can be used to reinforce the teaching of vowel graphemes in the early years of schooling as well as catch-up readers for older students who are struggling to read.

The 20 book series is to be read in sequential order. 

Each book contains

- 8 pages of written text with 200 to 230 words per book

- word reading practice for the targeted vowel grapheme

- word reading practice for the previously targeted vowel graphemes

- the chunking of long words at the bottom of reader’s page.  Suffixes are also broken away for easy decoding of the base word.  This assists the learning students to successfully decode longer words.

- four comprehension questions

- a vocabulary page that provides simple definitions of words in the book that children may not be familiar with.  This allows discussion of vocabulary prior to the book being read.

- a list of tricky words, grouped in spelling patterns found in the book and in the series

Julia is a Speech Pathologist who has over twenty-five years of experience working in the education.  She is currently involved in providing daily literacy intervention for small groups of students with learning difficulties.  Her intervention is based on the Science of Reading and therefore she highly values structured synthetic phonics and decodable texts to reinforce the phonics teaching. 

Chris retired from Primary School Teaching to become an artist.  She had dabbled in book illustrations as a teacher when she would illustrate books her class wrote together however this is her first illustration project for a publication.