I hate to admit it, but I love following rules. I put it down to my position within my family when I was growing up – the eldest of 3 daughters (a whole six minutes older than my twin sister!). An appreciation of rules does come in handy in my editing work, but sometimes stops me from thinking of myself as ‘creative’ – despite having edited, published and written educational resources for primary schools for over 20 years! Put a blank piece of paper in front of me and ask me to ‘write’, and I get a little nervous. But give me a hint of a brief (some ‘rules’) and my inner creative timidly pops up and furtively glances around.
But there are rules. And there are DECODABLE NONFICTION RULES.
Like Zac, the boy who tackles an
Whilst Zac’s challenges lay in climbing a net, traversing a treetop bridge and balancing on logs, my challenge was no less daunting: creating engaging and informative nonfiction texts using only a strict scope and sequence of phoneme-grapheme correspondences. Would I be up to it? Like Zac, quitting was NOT an option.
In I Did Not Quit, Zac had a lovely pal Ron to encourage him when things got tough. I was lucky enough to have a team of Rons at Little Learners Love Literacy spurring me on and guiding me through the treacherous obstacles of forbidden PGCs (phoneme-grapheme correspondences), an excess of syllables or premature adjacent consonants. As I slowly built up a bank of manuscripts that got the tick of approval from the publisher, my inner creative began to realise “I can do it!”.
Nothing is more frustrating than coming up with a ‘winning’ book idea only to realise that a crucial word is off limits due to the phonic constraints. But necessity is the mother of invention and, with persistence, new pathways to decodability can be opened up. And nothing is more satisfying than when Phonic Gods are smiling down on you.
When writing the Stage 6 book, Sloths, showcasing the ‘th’ PGC, I dared to dream that, somehow, I would be able to work the word ‘moth’ in as well as ‘sloth’.
A lengthy internet search ensued and I discovered the phenomenon of the ‘sloth moth’ – a moth that lives in a sloth’s fur.
To quote Zac after he finished the obstacle course, “Yes! I did it!”.
I can't reflect on this series without mentioning The Cat, a Stage 1 book by Berys Dixon. This manuscript was the first submission for the series and convinced me that writing a decodable book nonfiction book using only 8 different letters was possible, and could be done with aplomb. It’s an example of how a book’s structure, graphic design and photos can combine cleverly with the words to pack a big punch (ruthlessly dispatched by a feline paw!).
Creating decodable nonfiction that imparts knowledge and inspires curiosity?
YES! WE DID IT!