What is Code Mapping?

Code Mapping® is the process of identifying the speech sounds (phonemes) in words and the graphemes (the letter or letters) that represent them.
 

Our Code Mapping® Tool, powered by Ortho-GraphiX®, segments every word into graphemes rather than individual letters. Alternating black and grey shading shows where one grapheme ends and the next begins, making the structure of each word easy to see at a glance. Split digraphs are shown in blue. To reveal the phonemes, use MyWordz®, where the Phonemies® display the sound value of each grapheme.

Validated phonics programmes can explicitly teach only a limited number of grapheme-phoneme correspondences, around 100. Children are then expected to enter the self-teaching phase, using reading and writing to work out the many hundreds of correspondences they have not been explicitly taught. In England, at least one in four children does not make this transition successfully. They are not mapping words efficiently enough for reading to become automatic, leaving fewer cognitive resources available for comprehension.

Code Mapping® bridges that gap by making the code visible and supporting orthographic mapping.

How to use this Code Mapping® activity within Spelling Simplified 

Download one of the Code Mapping® sentences and read it aloud to the children. Although confident readers may be able to read it themselves, many of the children who need this activity most won't. So please simply read it to them.
 

The children then use Duck Hands® to identify the speech sounds while looking at each word and underline the graphemes that represent those sounds. 

This part will support their decoding skills.  In reading, pupils are taught to decode by identifying graphemes in written words from left to right, saying the corresponding phonemes, and blending those phonemes to say the whole word (Department for Education, 2023, p. 47).

Once they have mapped the words, compare their decisions with the Code Mapped® version downloaded from the Code Mapping® Tool in MyWordz®.

This also aligns with statutory spelling guidance that states that teachers should draw pupils’ attention to grapheme–phoneme correspondences that both do and do not fit with what has been taught so far (Department for Education, Spelling Framework, p. 75).

Finally, record any new words in the Spelling Book and use the 60 Second Spelling Routine® to help store them in the orthographic lexicon. If you have spelling tests, you have the lists to check!