The Fitzroy Method: Brief Explanation

The Fitzroy Program of Readers and Word Skills is not an ordinary set of story books and written activities with some phonics hints thrown in. It is systematic phonics.

You teach letters of the alphabet and the sounds they represent. You explain that a written word is a string of letters showing sounds from the left to right.

You teach children the skill of decoding English as they encounter it outside the classroom.
There are hundreds of thousands of English words. You cannot hope to teach them all! That's why the Fitzroy Method teaches students how to approach new words, by understanding sounds and digraphs.

The Fitzroy Method: How is it done?

Begin by talking about sounds, then joining of sounds, thus making words. Our alphabet represents sounds, both by single letters (a, b, c....) and by digraphs (ch, ew, tion...). From sounds such as a, h and t we make words such as hat.

The Fitzroy Readers systematically introduce sounds one by one with each story. The Fitzroy Method ensures fast progress and successful remediation because there are no surprises. Each new story uses only:

• the sounds and words learned in previous stories,
• the new sound that this story makes memorable, and
• a few new special words, that is sight-words which we do not attempt to sound out, because they do not conform to the rules (at least not to any that we have learned so far

The Fitzroy Method: Why it works

Children like rules. They retain far more if taught rules and exceptions rather than item-by-item.

Systematic phonics rewards children with regular victories. It is fun to know how to decipher a whole new family of words at a time - rather than having to endure a slow process of rote accumulation.

The Fitzroy Method is motivating because children love to go home with new skills that work in the world outside of school, prized skills that they can demonstrate within their own communities - such as reading signs, notes, labels, lists, stories, instructions, dictionaries:-

In Australia, more than 3500 schools have bought the Fitzroy Readers. In Singapore, it has grant its footing that apart from Schools, parents are using them! We recommend them to you.

Fitzroy Readers 51-60

The final Readers take students to total reading mastery. Children who have completed them find it easy to move on to a general literature, such as magazines, newspapers and novels.

Notice how these Readers look a lot like an illustrated novel. They are a great springboard for wider reading.

Description:Pack: A5 box or slip-case, 34mm thick, 720g. Contents: 10 story booklets. Readers 51 - 60. Border colour: dark green. Position in the Fitzroy Method: final 10 stories in a total set of 70.