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Sound Waves Literacy
All eReaders begin in a locked state. The teacher must unlock the Decodable eReaders for each unit after they’ve explicitly taught the phoneme–grapheme relationship lesson for that unit.
Unlocking a unit will provide all students in the class with access to the Support, Core and Extended books for that unit.
As all the students will be progressing through the same instructional sequence delivered via the explicit teaching lessons, there is intentionally no facilitation to unlock the eReaders on an individual student basis. Allowing students to jump ahead of the instructional sequence is in conflict with the pedagogical intent of Sound Waves Literacy and systematic synthetic phonics.
With this instructional approach, teachers will use the physical sets of Decodable Readers in class for optimal reading practice and use eReaders for additional home reading practice. When using the eReaders for home reading, we recommend teachers only unlock each unit a week or so after the explicit teaching of the phoneme–grapheme relationship and after modelled reading has taken place in class. This provides time for students to grasp the phoneme–grapheme relationship they’ve been taught, which helps keep the focus of home reading on fluency with the aim of students reading the books accurately without prompting.
To unlock a unit, teachers can log in to their account, open Sound Waves Literacy and navigate to the relevant unit. At the top of the unit page there is a lock/unlock toggle button.
When a teacher unlocks a unit, all students in the class gain access to all levels of books in the unit so teachers will need to communicate with parents to indicate which level of difficulty students should begin with: Support, Core or Extended. Teachers could also suggest that students explore the higher level/s with parental assistance, or read the easier level/s for additional reading practice.
Note: Bulk unlocking is also available. A teacher can unlock the Decodable eReaders for all units in the year at once within the My Classroom area of their Sound Waves access. This may be useful in Years 2–6 classrooms where students are not being explicitly taught the Foundation or Year 1 sequence and teachers may simply want struggling students to access the eReaders for additional reading support.