For teachers
The Keeper's Lodge
The lodge in the middle of the woods. Hang your coat by the fire — here are notes from one teacher to another. Use Sooty Woods for shared modelling on the IWB, as a planning prompt, or as a take-home link for parents.
Where each phase fits in the school year
Reception
Phase 1 ongoing throughout the year.
Phase 2 Autumn term.
Phase 3 Spring term.
Phase 4 Summer term — consolidating.
Year 1
Phase 5 across the whole year.
Phonics Screening Check in June.
Year 2
Phase 6 & the National Curriculum spelling appendix.
SATs in May (no formal phonics test, but reading SATs draw on it).
Year 3
National Curriculum spelling rules. Roots, prefixes, suffixes. Daily 10-minute spelling routines work well.
The four parts of a phonics lesson
A familiar rhythm helps children settle quickly. Most schools use a version of this 20–25 minute structure.
- Revisit & review — flash previously taught GPCs, recap tricky words.
- Teach — introduce the new grapheme. Say it, spot it, write it.
- Practise — read words on the IWB; segment to spell on whiteboards.
- Apply — read a sentence containing the focus sound; write a caption.
Sound-talk in your modelling
Be the model. Stretch sounds for blending: ssssss-aaaaa-t. Pinch the air on each phoneme for chopping. Children mirror what they see you doing.
Saying sounds purely
The single biggest classroom win is teaching adults to not add a vowel after consonants — "mmm" not "muh". Cat is c-a-t (three sounds), not cuh-a-tuh (which sounds like five).
Stretchy sounds
Hold them: s, m, n, f, l, r, v, z, sh, th.
Bouncy sounds
Pop them: b, d, g, k, p, t, ck. Quick, no schwa.
Five minutes you can steal
Quick games for transition times, supply cover, or the last five minutes of the day.
Cross the river
Stepping stones (cards) on the floor: each is a phoneme card. Children read the sound to step across. Add a "wobble" sound to make them giggle.
Silly sentences
You give the focus grapheme; the class makes the silliest sentence using three words containing it. Sheep shake shells.
Bingo
Draw a 3×3 grid. Children fill it with graphemes from this week. You call words; they cover the grapheme they hear.
Real or alien?
Show a word. Children show thumbs (real) or alien-arms (made-up). Brilliant Phase 5 prep for the screening check.
Spotting children who need more support
A few honest signals from low-stakes assessments are usually enough.
- Reading a few words with each new grapheme — can they decode unfamiliar words from sounds alone?
- Writing a phoneme on a whiteboard when you say it.
- Reading a short sentence aloud — fluency tells you a lot.
- For Year 1, half-termly mock screening checks (15–20 mixed real and alien words).
Children who slip behind early benefit most from short, daily, one-to-one keep-up sessions — far more than long catch-up sessions later.
Supporting SEN learners
Sooty Woods has a built-in Display options panel — look for the button in the bottom-right corner of any page. Settings save on the device, so a child using a class iPad keeps their preferences across sessions.
Dyslexia & visual stress
Switch on the dyslexia-friendly font for a sans-serif face with wider letter spacing and looser line height. The reading ruler dims the rest of the page so the eye stays on one line.
Low vision
Large and X-Large text resize the whole page, including word lists. The high-contrast theme switches to black-on-cream with thick outlines — useful for IWBs in bright rooms too.
Autism & sensory needs
Reduce motion turns off transitions and hover lifts. Pair it with the pop-out (below) so the child sees one grapheme at a time on a calm background, with no other items competing for attention.
Speech & processing
Every tile and word can be tapped to hear it spoken at a slightly slower rate. In the pop-out, press Space to repeat the sound as many times as the child needs.
Using Sooty Woods on your whiteboard
Each year-group page is built to be projector-friendly. The phoneme tiles are clickable: tap one and the browser will read the sound aloud (it works in most modern browsers; volume on your IWB needs to be up).
- Pop-out for the carpet. Long-press a phoneme tile (or shift-click) to open a giant fullscreen display of that grapheme. Use ◀ ▶ to step through the set, Space to say it again, Esc to close.
- Present this set. Above each row of tiles or word list there's a "Present this set" button — turns the section into a click-through slideshow.
- Word pop-out. Click any word in a word list to enlarge it for the class. Great for "spot the digraph" or shared reading.
- Display options (bottom-right) lets you bump text size, switch on high contrast, or turn on a reading ruler — handy when a child needs to see from the back of the carpet, or when the room is sun-glared.
- Press F11 for full-screen browsing, or use the pop-out's Fullscreen button for the cleanest modelling view.
- Right-click a page → "Print" gives a clean handout for word lists (the display panel and pop-out controls are hidden when printing).