Some students need many, many hours of intervention to begin to participate in the curriculum. Other students are coping but are far from their potential, and yet others need extending, building their skills and staving off boredom.
Our core resources, Wordchain and Comprehendit, provide the solution for both teacher and parent.
Both are solidly grounded in the Science of Reading; both are compatible with any structured literacy programme.
Some students need many, many hours of intervention to begin to participate in the curriculum. Other students are coping but are far from their potential, and yet others need extending, building their skills and staving off boredom.
Our core resources, Wordchain and Comprehendit, provide the solution for both teacher and parent.
Both are solidly grounded in the Science of Reading; both are compatible with any structured literacy programme.
How can a teacher of older students adequately cater to wildly diverse needs in their classroom?
How can a caregiver easily support a student at home?
Some students need many, many hours of intervention to begin to participate in the curriculum. Other students are coping but are far from their potential, and yet others need extending, building their skills and staving off boredom.
Our core resources, Wordchain and Comprehendit, provide the solution for both teacher and parent.
Both are solidly grounded in the Science of Reading; both are compatible with any structured literacy programme.
Our Products
Comprehendit
The Comprehendit programme combines a series of interactive digital books with a recorded New Zealand voice that asks questions, modelling the thinking of good comprehenders. Then instead of boring school work, i.e. book reviews and summaries, each book asks the students to write from a different perspective than is presented in the book.
Components (Physical) Letter tiles, sheets, levelled kits etc.
While students learn through WordChain, it can help to have other ways to build their skills. Our fluency sheets, letter tiles, sliders and puzzles teach students to recognise the repeating patterns in words. Students learn to look for those familiar patterns and then add up the components quickly.
Free Assessment Tool for Teachers and Parents
Our free assessment tools take the guesswork out of knowing where to start your students. They tell you most of what you need to know about where reading and spelling are breaking down, and indicate the best route forward for your students. track using the Agility with Sound system.
Free Assessment Tool for Teachers and Parents
What is yet to learn?
What can they do now?
What can be developed?
Identify exactly whereliteracy skills are missing. Our assessment tools take the guesswork out of knowing where to start your students. They tell you most of what you need to know about where reading and spelling are breaking down, and indicate the best route forward for your students. track using the Agility with Sound system.
Free Assessment Tool for Teachers and Parents
What is yet to learn?
What can they do now?
What can be developed?
Identify exactly where literacy skills are missing. Our assessment tools take the guesswork out of knowing where to start your students. They tell you most of what you need to know about where reading and spelling are breaking down, and indicate the best route forward for your students. track using the Agility with Sound system.
Wordchain Game
Wordchain is more than phonics. It builds the skills students need to apply phonics knowledge to their reading and spelling: segmenting and blending words, discriminating between similar sounds, such as p/b, or sh/ch, and phonological awareness (thinking in the sounds of words) to an instinctive, automatic way of thinking. Some students need a great many hours of practice to achieve this, and Wordchain delivers it.
Wordchain Game
Wordchain is more than phonics. It builds the skills students need to apply phonics knowledge to their reading and spelling: segmenting and blending words, discriminating between similar sounds, such as p/b, or sh/ch, and phonological awareness (thinking in the sounds of words) to an instinctive, automatic way of thinking. Some students need a great many hours of practice to achieve this, and Wordchain delivers it.
Choose from our senior version designed with students in Years 5-10 in mind or our Junior version features graphics and rewards suitable for younger students.
Wordchain Game
Wordchain is more than phonics. It builds the skills students need to apply phonics knowledge to their reading and spelling: segmenting and blending words, discriminating between similar sounds, such as p/b, or sh/ch, and phonological awareness (thinking in the sounds of words) to an instinctive, automatic way of thinking. Some students need a great many hours of practice to achieve this, and Wordchain delivers it.
Choose from our senior version designed with students in Years 5-10 in mind or our Junior version features graphics and rewards suitable for younger students.
Comprehendit
Comprehendit
The Comprehendit programme combines a series of interactive digital books with a recorded New Zealand voice that asks questions, modelling the thinking of good comprehenders.
Then instead of boring school work, i.e. book reviews and summaries, most books ask the students to write from a different perspective than is presented in the book. The students are guided, mostly sentence by sentence, how to write a report from a scientist explaining the issue to a government agency, or a reporter at the scene… Stuff that is relevant and empowering.
And, they really respond. You can almost hear their voices getting deeper as their confidence in comprehension and literacy grows.
The Comprehendit programme combines a series of interactive digital books with a recorded New Zealand voice that asks questions, modelling the thinking of good comprehenders.
Then instead of boring school work, i.e. book reviews and summaries, most books ask the students to write from a different perspective than is presented in the book. The students are guided, mostly sentence by sentence, how to write a report from a scientist explaining the issue to a government agency, or a reporter at the scene… Stuff that is relevant and empowering.
And, they really respond. You can almost hear their voices getting deeper as their confidence in comprehension and literacy grows.
Comprehendit
The Comprehendit program combines a series of interactive digital books with a recorded New Zealand voice that asks questions, modelling the thinking of good comprehenders.
Then instead of boring school work, i.e. book reviews and summaries, each book asks the students to write from a different perspective than is presented in the book. The students are guided, mostly sentence by sentence, how to write a report from a scientist explaining the issue to a government agency, or a reporter at the scene… Stuff that is relevant and empowering.
And, they really respond. You can almost hear their voices getting deeper as their confidence in comprehension and literacy grows.
Recommended by
teachers across
New Zealand
Wordchain is a real winner in my book. It really helped my son who has Auditory processing disorder (APD) to hear each sound correctly (and in a NZ accent) and be able to then identify the graphemes and blend the words back together again. In his words “It gave me repeated practice at hearing the individual sounds and then what they sounded like in the word and that helped me with my spelling, writing and reading.” I am also an RTLB and I recommend Wordchain as it’s a great way to provide multiple repetitions of segmenting and blending sounds in a supported way. The skills consecutively build on each other, and students get great satisfaction from freeing the characters from the chains. I also find that it helps parents support their children at home as they often feel overwhelmed by all the spelling patterns – Wordchain does this all for them! I highly recommend it.
……………………….
Amie Roberts was 2023 Apple Teacher of the Year (NZ), awarded for her outstanding work in structured literacy. She also received a Teacher Mentor special award.
For the last two years we have been learning about and supporting schools to implement Betsy Sewell’s Agility with Sound Programme. Betsy has provided the knowledge, skills and support to make the implementation of this Structured Literacy programme a great success in our Manurewa Community. Agility with Sound has been a brilliant resource for our schools and has provided a way of supporting our older struggling readers. Betsy also supports us by modelling lessons, which we find extremely helpful, and we now have many schools using the programme. The Wordchain app and web tool also boost student learning and we have had many students within our cluster experience accelerated progress in Literacy.
We trialled AWS with some of our target students last year. The results we achieved were fantastic, but what was even more exciting was that our students enjoyed the programme, remembered to go each day and that other students wanted to join as well. It is exciting when you have intermediate aged students asking to be part of a reading intervention.
Recommended
by teachers across
New Zealand
by teachers across
New Zealand
Wordchain is a real winner in my book. It really helped my son who has Auditory processing disorder (APD) to hear each sound correctly (and in a NZ accent) and be able to then identify the graphemes and blend the words back together again. In his words “It gave me repeated practice at hearing the individual sounds and then what they sounded like in the word and that helped me with my spelling, writing and reading.” I am also an RTLB and I recommend Wordchain as it’s a great way to provide multiple repetitions of segmenting and blending sounds in a supported way. The skills consecutively build on each other, and students get great satisfaction from freeing the characters from the chains. I also find that it helps parents support their children at home as they often feel overwhelmed by all the spelling patterns – Wordchain does this all for them! I highly recommend it.
……………………….
Amie Roberts was 2023 Apple Teacher of the Year (NZ), awarded for her outstanding work in structured literacy. She also received a Teacher Mentor special award.
For the last two years we have been learning about and supporting schools to implement Betsy Sewell’s Agility with Sound Programme. Betsy has provided the knowledge, skills and support to make the implementation of this Structured Literacy programme a great success in our Manurewa Community. Agility with Sound has been a brilliant resource for our schools and has provided a way of supporting our older struggling readers. Betsy also supports us by modelling lessons, which we find extremely helpful, and we now have many schools using the programme. The Wordchain app and web tool also boost student learning and we have had many students within our cluster experience accelerated progress in Literacy.
We trialled AWS with some of our target students last year. The results we achieved were fantastic, but what was even more exciting was that our students enjoyed the programme, remembered to go each day and that other students wanted to join as well. It is exciting when you have intermediate aged students asking to be part of a reading intervention.
Get in Touch
Get in Touch
