I still have the book which taught me to read, before I went to school. It's called Tiny Tot's First Book of All. The cover shows two wholesome children and a Scotty dog happily sharing a book, and opposite the title page is a colour plate showing a kitten up a tree eying some blue tits, captioned 'Kitty and Titty'.

I didn't realize then, but I was learning by the synthetic phonic method – in other words, learning the sounds that the different letters represented, and blending the sounds within each word. The stories in the book weren't nail-bitingly exciting, being along the lines of: "I am Sam. I can tap. I can run. My cat can see a dog," but I didn't mind: the pictures were lovely, the book was fat and pink, and before long I was reading more riveting tales about two lambs called Biff and Buff.

A couple of years later I passed on my reading expertise to my younger sister: I have a clear memory of explaining to her (on the beach at Bournemouth) that c-a-t spelled cat. I didn't know then that my passion for phonics would later lead to my writing a whole phonic reading scheme myself.

'Look and Say'

By the time my own children were at primary school, phonics was out of fashion, and instead an approach commonly called 'Look and Say' was in. By this method, children were encouraged to recognise whole words by their shape rather than by identifying and blending the letter codes for each sound. Thus they might be able to recognize "aeroplane" and "policeman" before they could decode "dog" or "cat".

The 'Look and Say' approach was fine for a lot of children, and certainly made it easier for the people writing the stories (one of the main criticisms of the phonic approach had been that the "I can hop!" type stories were not very motivating, but it's hard to write interesting stories with a very limited number of sounds and spelling patterns).

However, for many pupils, 'Look and Say' just boiled down to 'Look and Guess'. These children would follow the picture clues, but as soon as they progressed to books without pictures they were lost. One of my own sons coped well with flash cards, whereas the other two were clearly happier with a more phonic approach.

Bangers and Mash

An aunt of mine who was the head teacher of a school in Bermuda with a special interest in dyslexia discovered that the dyslexic children learned to read much better with some of the (then considered "old-fashioned") phonic reading schemes than with the 'Look and Say' method. On a visit to Britain, she helped one of my own children learn to read with a phonic scheme about two cheeky monkeys called Bangers and Mash. Talking to her convinced me further that it was time for phonics to make a comeback.

Recently, the pendulum has swung, and the government has recommended Synthetic Phonics as the primary teaching method for Reception and Year One classes. Not surprisingly, some teachers have expressed reservations as to whether this method can retain children's interest, and promote an understanding and enjoyment of books and reading.

Writing Phonic books

When I was asked to write 48 phonic reading books, I was both thrilled and daunted. I was already a devotee of the method (though I certainly don't think 'Look and Say' should be thrown out of the window) but I obviously didn't want to come up with the same vapid "See kitty hiss" texts which I'd read myself in Tiny Tot's Book of All.

By this stage I had written over a hundred songs and fifty or so children's books, and I often got letters from teachers saying that they used my rhyming picture books such as A Squash and a Squeeze and Room on the Broom to help children recognize different sounds and thereby to learn to read.

But writing Songbirds (the 48 reading books) was a much harder challenge. Every word in every book had to be phonically decodeable. In Book 1, I was only allowed to use the short vowels "o" and "a" plus four or five consonants. How to do that and still create an interesting story? I hit on the idea of two rival cartoon cats, each vying for the position of "top cat". The climax comes when the balloon carrying one of them sky-high goes "pop"!

Sometimes the limitations themselves suggested storylines. For instance, the book introducing the sounds "ch", "sh" and "th" naturally led to a story about a fish and chip shop.

When I came to write the book featuring long "ee" sounds, I realised what a lot of foody words there are with this sound in them – peas, beans, coffee, tea, jelly etc – and that gave me the idea for a story about fifteen queens having a feast. Then when I was on to the "oo" sounds I invented a kleptomaniac kangaroo who comes to school and steals the glue and the spoons.

I think it's really important to present new readers with a variety of stories and settings. One of my own children suffered from a reading scheme which consisted entirely of inner city stories about cars, lorries and policewomen. So I included some fantasy stories, some everyday tales, some in rhyme, a couple of non-fiction titles and a play. The publishers also chose a variety of illustrators, as here again children's taste differs widely.

Even when my characters were rather unlikely, I wanted readers to identify with them. So one of the very shortest and simplest books, "Bob Bug", is about night-time fears, the "big bad rat" in Bob's room turning out to be just a dark shape formed by a jumble of (phonically decodeable) objects such as a cup and a bib.

I certainly don't feel that other approaches to reading should be abandoned: teachers and publishers need to recognise that every child is different and that it's therefore vital to keep open as many routes as possible. But an understanding of "what letters make what sounds" does provide every child with the basic building blocks which they can resort to when presented with a long or unfamiliar word. So I'm delighted that phonics is now taken seriously again. Yes, it's challenging to come up with phonic stories which are not just a facile collection of sounds, but I have discovered (I hope) that it can be done, and that phonics can be fun.

Songbirds are published by OUP as part of the Oxford Reading Tree. More information about Julia Donaldson can be found on her website at www.juliadonaldson.co.uk.

Written by Julia Donaldson, author of 'The Gruffalo'

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What Is Synthetic Phonics? | The Clackmannanshire Experiment | The West Dunbartonshire Project | A Guide for Head Teachers | Phonics Can Be Fun | Synthetic Phonics Is Not Enough | Why Synthetic Phonics Is Wrong For Our Children | Enthusiasm Is The Key | Phonics Help & Advice

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