The POPS Reading Scheme has been devised in consultation with a range of professionals, including specialist teachers and speech therapists. It offers a carefully structured approach to developing early reading skills and spoken language competence.

The reading scheme supports the principle that progress in reading, speech and language and working memory are interlinked and can support each other in a reciprocal way.

The materials are very appropriate for children with specific speech and language impairments receiving specialist provision, and for children in a mainstream setting who have special educational needs.

The books feature the POPS family – Mum and Dad and their four children. The stories are of everyday events familiar to young readers, such as Mum losing her car keys, Dad getting stressed at the local burger bar and Milly and Kal painting their belly buttons. The CD-ROM’s provide a variety of useful resources, including the POPS Family Introduction Book introducing the characters and settings, and related worksheets and educational games.

Speech Therapists
The POPS Reading Scheme has been developed in conjunction with Speech and Language Therapists to ensure it targets the vocabulary a child with learning difficulties will need in their everyday life. This is based on the order in which children acquire certain words and the ability of the child to pronounce the words. It includes the key vocabulary required for reading and the words needed to develop more advanced sentence structures.

Every book contains scripted Language Development Techniques unique to the story line. Designed by Speech Therapists they support the development of a child’s communication skills, help the child to comprehend the “meaning” in the story, promote conversation and improve memory and retention skills. The techniques used are:

• Naming within a Category
• Recognising Emotions from the Illustrations
• Word Associations
• Asking Questions
• Model and Expand
• Prediction and Developing Reasoning Ability
• Sequencing and Recall

Promote Language Development
The following features help to promote language development

• The child can easily relate the story lines in the POPS Reading Scheme to their personal experience. This builds on the child’s understanding of everyday actions and equips them with everyday function words.
• Each text page is accompanied by a brightly coloured illustration which closely corresponds to the accompanying text, giving lots of visual clues to decipher the text.
• Natural language is consistently used in all books providing an opportunity for children to practice saying sentences that they may be unable to generate spontaneously even though they can understand such sentences.
• Using direct speech or oral language to model spoken language.
• Reading activities are provided to encourage progress to longer utterances and improved grammar in speech.

Talking Books and Simple Stories
Our schools downloads contain all the POPS characters for use with Clicker.