Skills Guide

Draft copy added 16 Sep — page still unpublished. Section anchors match the actual custom.topic values in use across the catalog (six areas, not the four originally assumed). Review before publishing.

What your child is building

Every Mrs Wordsmith product is designed around a specific set of reading and writing skills. Here's what each one helps your child build, and why it matters for their literacy journey.

Phonics

Phonics is the skill of matching letters to sounds — it's what lets a child look at an unfamiliar word and work out how to say it, rather than having to memorise it by sight. It's the foundation everything else in reading builds on, and it works in stages: each new sound pattern a child learns (a digraph, a silent letter, "magic e") unlocks a whole new set of words they can read on their own. The products linked here work through those patterns in order, matched to the UK's Letters and Sounds phonics phases, with audio support so children hear each sound said correctly rather than guessing from the page.

Alphabet & Handwriting

Before phonics can click, children need to recognise and form the letters themselves. This section covers the alphabet from the ground up — letter recognition, letter formation, and the handwriting practice that makes both automatic, so a child isn't still thinking about how to write the letter "b" when they should be thinking about the word it's part of.

Vocabulary Building

Vocabulary size is one of the strongest predictors of how well a child reads and writes — not because bigger words are impressive, but because understanding a text depends on already knowing most of the words in it. Research on reading comprehension (Carver, 1994; Nation, 2006) puts the threshold around 98%: below that, a child spends so much effort decoding unfamiliar words that they lose the thread of what they're reading. The products here build vocabulary in context — curriculum topics like Ancient Egypt or extreme weather, or a full year's worth of age-appropriate words — so new words arrive attached to something a child is actually interested in, not as an isolated list to memorise.

Reading Comprehension

Comprehension is where decoding and vocabulary come together: a child can sound out every word on a page and still not follow what it means. This section focuses on the vocabulary and passage types that show up again and again in comprehension assessments — from school reading tests to exams like the 11+ and Common Entrance — and on practising with exam-style questions rather than reading in the abstract.

Spelling & Grammar

Spelling and grammar are what make writing legible to someone else — the rules that turn a child's ideas into something a reader doesn't have to decode a second time. This section works through the spelling patterns and tricky words that come up most in UK exams (SATs, 7+, 8+, 11+), building year by year, alongside the grammar that holds a sentence together.

Writing

Writing draws on everything above — spelling, vocabulary, and the ability to structure an idea — and adds one more skill: planning. The products here give children a simple, repeatable framework for planning a piece of writing before they start, so the blank page is less daunting, plus the descriptive vocabulary that makes the finished piece more vivid.