Overview
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Year Levels F–6
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Curriculum ACT, NSW, NT, QLD, SA, TAS, VIC, WA
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Subject Literacy
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Resource Formats Print
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Learning Focus Synthetic phonics and decodable readers, Intervention
What it is
The Toe by Toe literacy program helps struggling readers improve reading skills, fluency, comprehension and spelling. Although suitable for anyone with reading difficulties, Toe by Toe was developed with students with dyslexia in mind.
Toe by Toe is split into three manuals to simplify teaching, making it ideal for all educators and even those without reading instruction expertise.
Toe by Toe helps students who struggle to decode written text and is the foundational tool in the series.
Stride Ahead builds on Toe by Toe to help students process information in a text and extract meaning from it more rapidly.
Stareway to Spelling helps students focus on spelling the 300 most used words in the English language.
What it includes
Discover how Toe by Toe, Stride Ahead, and Stareway to Spelling improve learner outcomes.
Toe by Toe
The basics
Toe by Toe is a decoding book that trains struggling readers to identify written text easily and quickly. It’s the first stage in a phonics-based reading program that is designed to be an easy-to-use tool for both learners and educators.
Toe by Toe
How it supports learners
Toe by Toe is designed to help learners achieve quick results. With only 20 minutes of study a day over several weeks, it can improve a struggling reader’s reading age by years. It can be beneficial for:
- children who are behind reading age
- children on the autistic spectrum
- children with ADHD
- children with dyslexia or dyslexic difficulties
- children and adults learning English as a second language
- parents who want to give their child reading confidence
- parents who are home educating
- schools looking for a literacy intervention program
- charities that want to help underprivileged readers.
Toe by Toe
How it’s used by educators
Toe by Toe helps learners convert letters and words into sounds that they can speak and pronounce correctly.
Toe by Toe can be studied at school or at home and can be implemented without the need for specialist training or expertise in reading instruction. All exercises are easy to follow, and everything is clearly explained ensuring almost anyone can help struggling readers learn to read with Toe by Toe.
Stride Ahead
The basics
Stride Ahead is a structured manual that helps readers better process and extract meaning from information in a text. It’s the perfect next step for students who have completed Toe by Toe.
Stride Ahead
How it supports learners
Stride Ahead suits learners who:
- can read fluently and with good pronunciation, but still have difficulty understanding and making sense of what they read
- are experiencing consequences of their comprehension struggles in other subject areas or in test environments.
Stride Ahead
How it’s used by educators
Stride Ahead uses timed exercises to sharpen and focus reading and comprehension skills. These timed exercises help learners to:
- accelerate their ability to better process the information in texts
- extract meaning from texts more rapidly
- devote more attention to the meaning in a text
- build confidence in time-pressured environments.
Stareway to Spelling
The basics
Stareway to Spelling helps transform students into confident readers, writers, and spellers by focusing on the 300 most-used words in the English language.
Stareway to Spelling
How it supports learners
Stareway to Spelling suits readers who:
- have trouble visualising words, leading to inaccurate spelling
- have difficulty connecting the ‘sight’ and ‘sound’ of words that are not phonetically consistent.
Stareway to Spelling
How it’s used by educators
The manual focuses on familiarising learners with the 300 most-used words in the English language so that they can read, write and spell them quickly, confidently, and accurately.
The success of Stareway to Spelling is its unique RAWS process: Read – Analyse – Write – Spell. The exercises are fun, and learners are encouraged to learn more as they see improvement in their writing and spelling skills.
Meet the authors
Keda Cowling, creator of the Toe by Toe manual, was born in 1926 in West Yorkshire. Although forced to leave school early for financial reasons, Keda maintained a love for school and her books. She never lost this passion or her burning desire to become a teacher, finally qualifying in 1968 at the age of 42. Despite this late start to her teaching career, she would develop methods that would change the lives of thousands of struggling readers worldwide.
Keda spent almost all her teaching career at one school – Sandal Road Primary School in Baildon, UK. After observing that some students’ reading difficulties persisted despite careful instruction, she began teaching students in her home after school each day. Though a relatively unknown term at the time, dyslexia fascinated Keda and she began to conduct her own research, which became the basis of Toe by Toe. Over the ensuing decades, Toe by Toe became the fully functioning system it is today.
Keda retired as a teacher at her primary school in 1989. She used her teacher’s pension to finance Toe by Toe, and it was finally published in 1994. It has become a phenomenal success. Since publication, Toe by Toe has sold more than 500,000 copies, helping hundreds of thousands of people to overcome their reading difficulties and as a result, dramatically change and improve their lives.
Frank and Kelsey Cowling, Keda Cowling’s sons, collaborated with Keda in producing her other published books – Stride Ahead and Stareway to Spelling.
Frank and Kelsey both have considerable teaching experience, both overseas and in the UK. As well as managing the business, they also continue to teach Toe by Toe, Stride Ahead and Stareway to Spelling in the very same home that Keda opened the doors to her first students more than 45 years ago.
Samples & downloads
- SPELD Info Sheet - High Quality Evidence Based Phonics Programs Download PDF (117KB)
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