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My Little Pony Make Your Mark I Can Read!

The HarperCollins I Can Read! My Little Pony book series features pony characters from the Hasbro my little pony franchise. These books have been a big hit in my house because my children love the fifth generation of My Little Pony from the Netflix show Make Your Mark. How Accessible is The Language in the My Little Pony Books? The books are rated at level 1 and 2 of the I Can Read! series. I thought that this rating was too low because there are some difficult words to decode and I would have placed them all at level two or three. The names of places are on the longer side like Equestria but the children were already familiar with these from watching the TV show.  The biggest accessibility issue with these books are the "pony puns". Several equine word plays are used. For example, instead of everybody, anybody, nobody and somebody the books use everypony, anypony, nopony, somepony. The maritime area is called maretime bay, the 5 main ponies are called the mane 5. For emergen...

Hand Writing Spellings Helps Students To Remember

spelling workbook reading eggs words writing to remember
Spelling workbook matches the words
introduced in Reading Eggs

I produced a collection of Spelling Workbooks to help my daughter. She had reached level 40 on Reading Eggs and unlocked spelling and the driving game which accompanies them. While fun I wanted a way for her to practice spelling the new words away from the tablet.


I remember when I was at school the first thing we did after hanging up our coats was to sit at our desks and write out our weekly spellings, on a Friday morning we would always have a spelling test. I was a great speller at school and I often wonder if my reliance of spellcheckers and auto correct has led to a decline in my spelling ability. Maybe it is just age, how is your spelling now compared to when you were at school?

There are at least two recent research papers which suggest that writing things by hand helps us to memorise them. As a paper planner type with a love of stationery I found this really interesting. The University of Tokyo paper from (2021) says brain activity is stronger when writing on paper compared to a tablet and second paper from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (2024) calls writing by hand a learning strategy because of the complex neural connectivity patterns that it creates.  I always knew I needed to write things down to remember them, even today I still write notes to myself with important deatils that I don't want to forget. Placing value on handwriting for spelling retention is why the read, cover, write, check test memorisation strategy is still a mainstay in my spelling toolbox.


I like the printed spelling workbooks for convenience of having eveything laid out in one place. You can also print the spelling workbooks from a digital download on my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

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