"Hello to our Reading Bees community, and a very special welcome to those of you seeing this for the first time. We're so glad that you're here.

Have you ever noticed that your child struggles to recognise sounds? So many parents I speak to are unaware of sounds' important role in teaching our kids to read. These are very early skills called pre-literacy skills. Listening to the rhythm of speech, playing with sounds, all of that wordplay, creating silly names, and rhyming names are really helpful in assisting children later when they start to learn to read.

Earlier in my career, I was lucky to be part of an Early Intervention Program working in schools. Part of that was screening all of the preps as they were starting school to determine those children who potentially would need support, mostly with their theory of phonemic awareness and then working with those children throughout the year.

Time and time again, just by doing that phonemic awareness screening - without knowing whether or not the child knew their letters - without seeing a child even attempt to read a book, just based on those results of their phonemic awareness. I confirmed, with certainty, with the teachers which children were already reading or already on their way to reading."