Home Schooling
Piper Books’ BRI (Beginning Reading Instruction) and ARI (Advanced Reading Instruction) programmes are designed to transform the 4-year-old beginner into a confident and enthusiastic reader within 2-3 years.
No specialised training is required by the instructor – just the brief Getting Started with BRI and Spelling with BRI guides. Synthetic Phonics principles ensure that reading a ‘real story’ is possible from day one, with each new sound clearly introduced and rigorously practiced in many different contexts. There are no unpleasant surprises for the child – providing they simply ‘Say the sounds and read the word’ and avoid developing damaging habits like guessing.
The early tales are gentle, appealing and humorous and children relish the little weaknesses and vanities of the endearing animal characters. Accuracy rather than speed is all-important; each child will develop from painstaking decoding to automaticity, fluency and comprehension in their own time. The questions provided offer the opportunity to double-check understanding whilst practising speech, language and communication. The child should choose favourite stories to reread with increased expression and discuss in more depth.
The three Levels of BRI (a total of eighty-eight little stories) are usually completed in little over a year. After this, ARI (Advanced Reading Instruction) continues with the same meticulous introduction of the English Alphabetic Code within lively stories, combined with copious amounts of practice and increased sentence complexity. The three ARI Levels offer 125 diverse tales with a combined word-count of 57,700.