Hi! It's me again, Lisa MacCormac, the creator of 'Sounds make Words make Stories'. I have over 25 years experience of training and educating, 12 of which have been in multiple international schools and as a private tutor, focused on early childhood. My passion quickly became encouraging, empowering and enabling students to read. The reason I embarked on this project was initially quite simple.
 
For sometime I had been using a variety of well-branded phonics resources and I continually came across two major problems.
 
Firstly, I always found that each time I introduced a new sound group, there was rarely a supporting reader book available that a child could actually read, given their learning of the new sounds. I would introduce a sound group, practise the sounds using multi-sensory activities and then give a child a reader book that supposedly corresponded to the new sound group. Inevitably, these reader books included words containing sounds that had not yet been learned and too many high-frequency sight words. My readers, would get confused and frustrated and would then feel that their learning was not actually useful because they couldn’t apply their new knowledge immediately. And so the downward spiral of not wanting to read or to learn new sounds would start.  
 
Secondly, it was incredibly difficult to use material from more than one set of phonics resources at the same time, as each set introduces different sound groups at different points. I soon came to understand that the material available was introducing too many sounds at once or in an order that didn’t allow the child to feel accomplished in their reading ability. And none of these resources were supported by appropriately scaffolded reading materials. I had not found a program that was structured in an ordered and scaffolded way. So I decided to tackle these problems by writing 'Is It?' and 'Pat and Pip'. What started off as a couple of reader books to fill a gap, has now become 'Sounds make Words make Stories', a truly unique, totally scaffolded and really effective reading program.
 
For updates, including newly published titles and newly uploaded resources, please follow my Facebook page. Please be patient with me and note that this facebook page is currently being updated as I have left it alone for way too long!! And if you like it too, please don't hesitate to click the 'like' button and feel free to share it with your friends! Link here:
 
Oh, and by the way, I am a wife and a mum, and we all love to read! And we have a gorgeous dog called Hadley, who doesn't read but loves to play!