Frequently Asked Questions and Tutorials
Online Account Tutorials for Teachers
How to Set Up Your School Account
Online Account Tutorials for Parents
General Questions
What is All Aboard Phonics?
All Aboard Phonics is a complete systematic, synthetic phonics curriculum for the early development of reading skills. It covers the first 2-3 years of formal phonetic instruction, plus an optional preschool curriculum. It is fully validated as an SSP by the UK DfE, and it undergoing validation in several American states/districts.
The curriculum includes daily lesson plans in our teacher manuals, worksheets for the learners, flashcards, posters, a reading intervention, plus 57 decodable books that children actually want to read! There is also a free All Aboard App for home reading practice.
What is the research behind All Aboard Phonics?
Our research is based around understanding the causes of reading difficulties that we have seen in our intervention work of 15 years. We have a unique depth of knowledge in the area of reading intervention, based around neurology, linguistics, morphology, educational psychology, neuropsychology, and more.
The All Aboard Phonics curriculum was created as a process to avoid difficulty for every child before it develops. Our intervention can be used for any struggling learner, whatever aspect of learning to read is difficult for them. Learn more about our Research Basis here.
What are pictophones?
Pictophones teach reading the way the brain wants to learn: through successful practice. A pictophone is simply a visual representation of a sound that helps a learner segment and blend a word. It was created as a backlash against three-cueing, balanced literacy or whole word reading systems. Pictophones are ideal for visual learners, dyslexics, beginners, or struggling readers.
Each image represents a single sound in the English language. For example, the Toad About to Explode represents the /t/ sound.
Do you have a reading intervention?
All Aboard Phonics Plus is our intervention curriculum, designed to identify the cause of difficulty for a child and apply the right solution each time. It includes baseline assessments and end-of-stage assessments to help you guide each learner through to a positive outcome.
Questions for Teachers
What is included in Premium membership?
Premium includes:
- Online assessments
- Data tracking
- PowerPoint lessons
- Digital library access for your pupils
- Our Trainertext Creator tool
- Our Phonics Play Zone
What is the difference between the UK, USA and Australian versions of AAP?
The USA and Australian versions of the phonics curriculum differs in the handwriting and print fonts used in the resources. Otherwise, they are identical.
How to Set Up Your Online School Account
The video below will take you through the steps of setting up your school account, adding classes, learners and parent emails. The video also includes a detailed overview of the new assessment system.
Additional Notes
- A new process can be a bit concerning when you have been pleased with the old version. Test it through the term and then judge it. One of the key aims is to save you and your colleagues a tonne of time. But do model the assessments on the smartboard for the children first.
- The nature of every assessment like this is to spot and monitor those who are falling behind. Those who are doing fine are not the worry. So, with the new system, you can spot those that are falling behind, give them a quick catch-up intervention and reassess just the bits that they were weak on.
- The new dashboard is very much V1.0. It will be developing over the next few weeks to give you more detailed insights.
- We have not installed a cohort upload process yet because it is quite complex to do that in a way that works smoothly from different spreadsheets. For the class TA to add 30 children is about 20 minutes of typing, which will be saved when you do your first assessment. So I hope it makes sense from that perspective.
- We will be adding the old phonics game that can be used in Phases 2 and 3. We will aim to make the other games phase sensitive too.
We are planning to add some new facilities like an EAL module, a Phonics Screening Check style assessment and Tricky Words assessment.
How do I update a learner’s name or parent’s email?
Go to the Assessment System > Class Dashboard > Class Admin > Edit Learner
You will also see an option to set a new temporary password for a parent. You can share this temporary password with the parent and then once they have logged in, they can update the password from within their account.
How do I use the trainertext flashcards?
How do I use the reread technique to boost fluency?
Questions for Parents
Online Account Tutorial for Parents
How do I get started using the digital resources?
Once your school has added your child to the school account, you should automatically receive an email from All Aboard Learning inviting you to set a password. You can then click Login > Parent Login from the top right of this website and log in with the email address the school has on file for you and the password you have just set.
I have not received a password reset email
The email might have gone to your spam folder.
If it has not then let the class teacher know. They can then set a temporary password for you, which you can update once logged in by going to Account > My Account > Change Password.