STRUCTURED LITERACY- EARLY READING – PM and READY to READ BOOKS
Can I still use Magenta PM books alongside Structured Literacy? Surely, they still offer value, even if students are memorising the words?
This is a great question, and it’s completely understandable that teachers would be asking it . When you begin shifting your practice, you may find it hard to let go of what you’ve always known and what feels familiar. But moving toward Structured Literacy (SL) is not just a resource swap, it’s a mindset shift rooted in deep understanding.
One of the most crucial parts of Structured Literacy is knowing why you do something. If you understand the “why,” it becomes clear why using PM books in Year 1 with new entrants isn’t aligned with SL. A high-quality SL provider should be explaining this in great detail — because SL is not just about what is taught, but how, when, to whom, and why it is taught.
Ask yourself: Are you using PM books because you believe they work and enjoy using them, or because there is strong evidence and research to support your practice? Personal bias plays a huge role in teaching, and that’s exactly why it’s important to reflect and ask, Why am I doing this? The new curriculum is grounded in evidence and research, can you confidently say the same for your current teaching decisions? If you’re unsure, then keep asking questions. That’s what makes this question such a good one, it shows curiosity, and it takes time to build the deep understanding and knowledge that underpins effective Structured Literacy instruction.
As a New Entrant teacher, you are the most important person in that child’s educational journey. You are laying the foundation for everything that follows, not just in Years 1, 2, and 3, but in Years 5, 7, 8, and even in high school. Structured Literacy is about securing the foundations so that children are equipped to become independent learners, setting them up for long-term success and helping to prevent the thousands of children who leave school unable to read or write confidently or not at all.
Think of it like building a house. If you cut corners with cheap concrete, the house may look fine at first, but eventually, it will sink. In this analogy, the alphabetic principle is the concrete. How you teach it is like the quality of that concrete, and it matters. It must be taught explicitly and systematically, following a clear scope and sequence. Why? Because over 40 years of research from the Science of Reading tells us this is what works. It also tells us why mixing MSV (meaning, structure, visual cues) with SL confuses children and weakens their foundation.
MSV (Meaning, Structure, Visual) is an outdated cueing system where children are taught to rely on pictures, context, and sentence structure to guess unfamiliar words, instead of learning to decode them using phonics knowledge. This strategy may appear helpful short-term, but it bypasses the alphabetic principle and teaches habits that are hard to unlearn. It leads to over-reliance on guessing, which ultimately slows down fluent reading development and hinders spelling. Children need to be taught how to read words, not guess them.
Each year of learning is like the bricks, floors, windows, and roof of the house and each one depends on the strength of what came before. If the foundation is poor, the upper levels can’t hold. Children begin to switch off, disengage, and struggle to access new learning, not because they aren’t capable, but because they were never given the quality skills needed to keep building. This is why your role in those first years is so critical.
When you teach a child to look at pictures or guess words instead of focusing on sounds and letters, you’re undermining their ability to decode, the very skill they need to become fluent readers. But decoding is only half the story. Children also need to encode; to take the sounds they hear and map them to letters when spelling. Encoding strengthens phoneme-grapheme connections and supports long-term spelling accuracy. Relying on whole-word memorisation may help a child read a word briefly, but it does not support encoding. In fact, it makes it harder for children to learn to spell, especially those with learning differences. You can’t skip decoding and expect encoding to develop, both are essential and must be taught together, explicitly and systematically.
It’s important to acknowledge that many teachers bring years of experience into the classroom, that matters. But there can be confusion between teaching the alphabetic principle and the language component of reading. If you look at Scarborough’s Reading Rope, the alphabetic principle is just one part of the rope, the other is the rich language strand, which includes vocabulary, background knowledge, syntax, verbal reasoning, and language structures.
This language side is where Structured Oral Language (SO) comes in and it’s crucial, especially in New Entrant and Year 1 classrooms. At this stage, children are still developing oral language, vocabulary, and sentence structure, which are foundational for later comprehension and writing. SO is not about guessing words; it’s about building oral language systematically and intentionally through quality talk, storytelling, sentence expansion, narrative retell, and rich vocabulary exposure. This includes daily opportunities to hear and use new words in meaningful contexts, not just during reading, but across all classroom interactions.
You can build SO through shared reading, poetry, nursery rhymes, rich picture books, oral storytelling, big books, and play-based conversations. These practices strengthen the language comprehension strand of Scarborough’s Rope and set children up for long-term success in reading and writing. These elements haven’t gone away, they are essential for oral language development and should be deliberately planned and embedded in daily teaching, especially in the early years.
However, PM books, especially titles like Magenta, do not provide this rich language. They are designed for memorisation and using cues to infer, not to build decoding skills. Decodable books, by contrast, are specifically designed to reinforce the sounds and letters you have taught, strengthening the foundation and supporting David Share’s Self-Teaching Hypothesis giving children the ability to learn new words independently once they have the code.
You should be reading to children and doing everything rich language includes left-to-right tracking, comprehension, inferencing, rhyme, rhythm, prosody, and exposure to wide vocabulary. That’s essential. But don’t try to teach both strands of the rope using two different approaches. When a 5-year-old is still trying to build their basic foundation of code knowledge, mixing methods will confuse and overwhelm them. You must be mindful of cognitive overload, trying to teach everything at once does not accelerate learning, it fragments it. Structured Literacy and MSV are fundamentally incompatible. One teaches children to read words by understanding the code; the other teaches them to guess. If a teacher is trying to implement Structured Literacy while still encouraging MSV habits, they are sending mixed messages and weakening the very foundation they are trying to build.
The curriculum does advise that PM books may be used toward the end of Year 1, but only after students have been explicitly taught a substantial set of phonemes (sounds) and graphemes (letters). That’s because, at this point, David Share’s theory can begin to take effect. But without the knowledge base in place, the brain cannot self-teach, and children are at risk of being left behind.
The alphabetic principle focuses on sounds and letters “the code”. Understanding meaning from books and pictures is part of the language component of reading, which is also important, but it should never be confusing with the code instruction. When you teach explicitly and systematically, you give each child the tools they need to become confident, capable, and independent readers and learners, not just today, but for life.
It’s also important to remember that Structured Literacy is not a programme. It’s a framework grounded in how the brain learns to read. It provides a consistent, evidence-based approach to teaching that can be adapted to meet the needs of different learners. Some students will move faster than others. Those who have mastered certain sounds and graphemes more quickly may be ready for more than one decodable book per week or for additional extension tasks. The key is not to change the approach, it’s to keep the structure and routines consistent, and adjust the pace. This allows you to differentiate within the Structured Literacy framework, meeting students where they are while maintaining the integrity of the method that is based on years of research and evidence.
Links
https://fivefromfive.com.au/phonics-teaching/the-self-teaching-hypothesis/
https://www.deb.co.nz/dyslexia/dyslexia/the-science-of-reading/
https://www.deb.co.nz/education/school/what-is-cognitive-load-theory/
Created by Sharon Scurr 24 May 2025