“Highly effective and deceptively simple, the Easyread System
succeeds in making learning to read fun.”
Rebecca Abrams
Daily Telegraph
Families Columnist
Easyread Spellmagic is designed to make your child's spelling drop into place, as if by magic, with a short (5-15 minute) lesson online each day.
We do very little direct spelling work to achieve that. You may have have already found that repeating spellings is a waste of time if the foundation to a child's spelling has not been established.
That foundation comes from the right reading strategies. If your child is sight-reading words and guessing a lot, then you can expect to see some atrocious spelling. Often we find children can do a spelling test by memorising them overnight, but a week later those words have gone again. So they are stuck on a plateau, unable to improve.
The Test for Sight Reading
So a key thing to know is whether your child is sight reading or decoding. The test for that is to compare his or her ability to read the next three paragraphs. For a decoder, each paragraph will seem pretty straight forward, although paragraphs 2 and 3 make you pause momentarily. For a sight reader the first paragraph will seem easy and the other two much, much harder or impossible:
Paragraph 1 (normal):
The pig farm was up a beautiful valley, at the end of a long winding road, between tall trees and broad hedges. Mr Smith the farmer loved his simple life in the countryside, looking after his animals.
Paragraph 2 (letters mixed up):
His sports car was panited oarnge, with braod, yleolw stirpes over the roof. Jim lvoed his Mstunag more than amolst aynthnig in his life.
Paragraph 3 (nonsense):
The brin, smight fload is where glagged balfs trow fron with oabs and snuts and flates of shrab. If you vroy after them juffedly with smoor and slirk, you will gwipe a shnook.
If your child reads paragraph 1 fluently but finds paragraphs 2 and 3 very difficult, that is a sure sign that he or she is a sight reader, not a decoder.
How Easyread Spellmagic Works
So to fix someone's spelling difficulty, we re-engineer the way they read. It means that we take them right back to A, B, C.
This approach delivers two benefits:
First, it is a very painless process.
Our daily lessons are only 5-15 minutes long and are designed to be fun and easy. There is no rote learning of spellings or lists of spelling rules. With time (normally around 5 months) the spelling just starts to drop into place... as if by magic! Indeed you may even question whether it has really happened because of Easyread.
And secondly, the learner's reading is dramatically improved as well.
Even if your child's reading seems quite fluent now, I would imagine that new words and placenames can be quite hard. And does your child make surprising mistakes with some of the short words?
So the Spellmagic process will improve your child's reading accuracy, comprehension and joy in reading as well as changing your child's spelling.
If that goes well, we then need to set up an account for you. You can do that from our pricing page.
Once the account is created your child can log in from our Easyread home page. When a lesson has been done, the next one becomes available 10 hours later, so that we build a rhythm of lesson-sleep-lesson. If you are away for a few days that next lesson will just wait for you. And you always have access to the current lesson and the last three.
Spellmagic is a sequential process that builds spelling experience and confidence day by day.
Built into the lessons are codewords for prizes. We use good prizes and they are important for the motivation of your child and celebrate the success and progress being achieved.
The codewords also trigger some of the coaching we need to do with you. We like to create a triangular team (us + your child + you). So we need to coach you in your critical role. That also involves three routine phone interviews and as much further interaction as is necessary.
Our Aim
Most of the children starting Spellmagic have really poor spelling, that is often their own phonetic creation. Our aim is for their spelling to have a sound base with at least 90% of the words correct in an average piece of writing.
So this is not training for a Spelling Bee competition! It is about the fundamental building blocks of good spelling. Once that is in place, continued progress becomes relatively easy.
More complex or unusual words will often have to be learnt in addition to what we do, and improvement will come over a matter of months, not days or weeks.
Unconditional Guarantee
We are very confident of getting a great result for you and your child. So we offer an unconditional guarantee with every course. If you are anything less than delighted, then you are free to ask for a full refund at any stage in the process or even after finishing.
But the key to that is your child wanting to do the course. So our trial lesson is very important. If your child does not ask to do more, we should discuss carefully whether we are the right solution or not.
Sample Lesson
The first step is to test our sample lesson. Just click the link below to do that:
If the sample lesson has gone well, then we are confident of a good result and recommend you give it a go (with our unconditional guarantee taking away any risk you have).
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to call. We are here to help. Reading and spelling are actually far more complex than most people realise. And very few teachers are trained in the problems that can arise. But we are happy to discuss what you have seen with your child's spelling and advise on whether we can help or not.
