Berys Dixon
Berys is an experienced teacher and writer with a passion for creating engaging and humorous stories for children learning to read.
Having used the whole language/balanced literacy approach for many years in her classroom, she became dissatisfied with its lack of clear guidance in teaching phonics.
In 2008, Berys discovered there was a plethora of evidence-based research on how the brain best learns to read. Research which the teaching profession had not been alerted to!
Armed with this stimulating new knowledge, Berys switched to a phonics first approach, namely ‘synthetic phonics’ which means ‘synthesising’ or blending the sounds/graphemes to read words.
With explicit, sequential instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics as the foundation for teaching children to read and spell, the results were remarkable, with substantial improvements in the children’s abilities in reading, writing, vocabulary, comprehending and enjoyment of literature.
Berys wrote the Pocket Rocket stories for her class of Preps and Grade 1’s because those predictable stories in the school just weren’t going to cut it anymore.
Guessing and predicting words from pictures and context is not reading!!
What a difference synthetic phonics made to the students’ literacy skills!
Daniel
Daniel is the administrative manager of Reading Matters Publishing, overseeing day to day operations and the smooth running of the business while Berys can get on with writing more Pocket Rocket stories. He is happy to answer any queries you may have.
You can watch me tell my story here: