Secret Stories® is a mnemonic-based, phonics tool that can be used with any reading or phonics curriculum to help children quickly connect the phonics patterns with their sounds. Aligned with the Science of Reading and neuroscience research, Secret Stories® uses familiar, story-based frameworks to help children understand the sounds letters make together, alongside embedded mnemonic sound images to help recall them for independent reading and writing. Incorporating Secret Stories® with existing reading/phonics curriculum advances the speed of phonics instruction, giving learners access to as much of the phonics code as possible, as fast and as soon as possible.
Ever wonder why letters make the many different sounds that they do? Secret Stories® are the “secret” reasons WHY letters get together and make the sounds that they do in words. They provide logical explanations for letter sound behavior that a child’s brain craves. Rooted in the science of reading and cognitive neuroscience, Secret Stories® targets early developing and already primed neural pathways for learning, aligning “letter behavior” to “kid behavior” to make phonics more accessible and predictable for all learners.
Secret Stories® is NOT a program, but embedded mnemonic tools that are designed to work with existing reading or phonics curricula to “speed-up” access to code kids need to read.
Secrets aren’t something you do, they’re something you use to make sense of what you’re already doing—which is looking at words all day long that kids cannot read. This includes words in the reading program that are often leaps and bounds ahead of the phonics its teaching them. Secret Stories are the “just in time” phonics tools kids need to read these words NOW so they don’t have to memorize them.
When used alongside a structured literacy program, Secret Stories® gives teachers a way to keep pace with students’ needs for daily reading and writing, not just during the reading block, but in all content areas across the entire instructional day.