Discover the Joy of Reading with the 1,2,3 and Away Series
Emma Hartnell-Baker Uses the Series to Guide Toddlers Towards a Lifelong Journey of Reading for Pleasure.
Spelling Clouds®
Who is Emma Hartnell-Baker
aka The Neurodivergent Reading Whisperer?
Connect on LinkedIn
British-Australian Emma Hartnell-Baker is a late-diagnosed woman with Autism and ADHD, passionate about self-directed, play-based learning that celebrates and includes all learners. After creating the Speech Sound Pics (SSP) Approach in Australia, along with tech such as the SSP Spelling Piano app, she applied her insights about the education system, and its slow pace of change, to address the elements she identified as crucial in preventing children from speaking, reading, and spelling. As a way to improve teacher phoneme-grapheme awareness and ability to differentiate phonics instruction within the neurodiverse classroom setting innovative tech-solutions were developed.
Emma delivers SpLD training for PATOSS
Miss Emma has a Master's degree in SEND and is undertaking doctoral work at the University of Reading, developing the Phoneme-Grapheme Awareness Proficiency Screener (P-GAPS) for phonics teachers. This is to identify trainee teachers who, despite being proficient readers, may not fully understand how to effectively build the orthographic lexicons of children, particularly if those learners are neurodivergent. Orthographic interference* is identified and can be relatively easily overcome. This makes it easier to support students with dyslexia. For more information and to join the team, see the Ortho-Graphix Awards
*Orthographic interference effects are normal and unproblematic for students in advanced literacy acquisition (Schnitzler 2008). However, it is of immense, practical importance that primary school teachers are able to inhibit their orthographic knowledge for the purpose of correct diagnosis and support (cf., Schründer-Lenzen 2013, p. 28).
In basic terms, can you provide the expected phonemes when mapping the words 'village,' 'elephant,' 'story,' and 'giraffe'?
