Sad Dog Literacy

Sad Dog Literacy is a high impact, low-cost, digital intervention for use with small groups of children aged 7-10 who are struggling to make expected progress in literacy learning. It can be used in mainstream, special schools, pupil referral units and within Alternative Provision. Sad Dog Literacy is a complementary intervention successfully developed to align with and work effectively alongside a school’s systematic synthetic phonics programme. It provides targeted support to reinforce and extend phonics learning and develop fluency and confidence in reading and writing. Sad Dog Literacy uses the highly innovative technique of combining structured, decodable, therapeutic stories with tried and tested methods of teaching literacy in keeping with the DfE’s Reading Framework and Writing Framework. This approach has been shown to engage and motivate the most disadvantaged children including those with autism, ADHD, cognition and learning needs, dyslexia, speech and language needs and those who have had adverse childhood experiences. Research trials of Sad Dog Literacy have shown improvements in children’s attention and listening skills, handwriting, spelling, sentence composition, substantial gains in word reading and remarkable gains in comprehension.