The cubs box that we tried was all about festivals. There was an interactive board book about Chinese New Year. Smallest Child absolutely loved this book. It was really vibrant and a great way to start off learning about different world festivals. There were also craft ideas to help them learn about Christmas, Diwali, Chinese New Year and Hanuka. The boxes included all the resources to do the crafts. There’s also some additional activities in the box, instructions on how to use the resources and a recipe to make some bear biscuits. Each delivery focuses on the group of letters and sounds your child needs to learn, with games and activity sheets to assist them, and advice for parents on how to be helpful. Each box also boosts critical words like ‘the’, ‘do’ and ‘go’ – the words that children can’t sound out using phonics. Month by month, your child builds confidence. Independent readers are independent thinkers, and once your child has mastered the skills of reading, they will be able to access ideas, stories and information from right across time and all around the world. They’ll be able to read and understand information in every area of the curriculum and learn about any subject that interests them. Independent readers find far fewer barriers to future success, whatever direction they take in life. An accurate reading is also really important for your child’s future learning at school. Throughout primary and secondary school – and right through further education and beyond – it’s so much harder to learn effectively without good reading skills. Learning their phonics will help your child to read accurately and focus on the meaning – which will enable them to learn so much more effectively in every part of the curriculum! Once you join your child will receive a bundle of books and activities delivered to your door each month. Just let us know the book band level your child uses at school to start or we can sensibly place your child based on their age, school stage and the time in the school year (see our handy chart). We will work with you and tweak their reading level until it is just right. Targeted practice

I have spent my whole career in publishing, but the last 10 years I worked as a children’s educational publisher. After writing my MA thesis on early literacy, and researching the importance of establishing reading habits from a young age and what a huge difference it makes if parents are involved to support reading at home, I knew I wanted to build my career in children’s publishing. The Bear Can Read, a subscription service delivering bespoke early literacy and phonics bundles to children aged 2-7 so that parents can support them at home, was an idea that bubbled away a couple of years until I finally took the leap. Did you ever sit down and plan your career? We curate and commission the latest (and greatest) phonics materials for each age and stage. We shadow schools, so your child’s reading journey is a seamless transition between home and school. The right reading level These are called ‘sound buttons’, and they help your child to split up a word into its separate sounds, and then blend all those sounds together to read the word. In the word ‘night’, the long ‘i’ sound is spelled with three letters, ‘igh’. So, we put a dash under all three letters, to show they are a trigraph – three letters that make one sound.We are big readers in this house, and we always have been. Smallest Child is currently too small to read but she loves having stories read to her. The Bear Can Read is a reading subscription box for children aged 2 upwards. Each box is tailored to the reading stage of the child. It includes books and additional resources to help your child in their reading journey. For me, I think the curation of these collections is fantastic, with a good mix of fiction and non fiction, and for younger ones providing themes and concepts that support their development outside of Reading and Phonics. My 3 year old is just getting into the worksheets, but absolutely loves all the stories and books that come in her parcel every month. The addition of a character to support the stories is a wonderful touch. As you can see, sound buttons are a handy way to see how many sounds there are in a word. They also show which are single-letter sounds, and which are digraphs or trigraphs. This helps your child to read the word. Also, if they add their own sound buttons to words, it will really help your child to identify all the different sounds and get used to the way the word looks written down. This will help their spelling, as well as their reading! Phonics activities

Camilla has 16 years’ experience with educational publishing, with in particular expertise in children’s reading and phonics. During her career Camilla has worked at Ladybird, Penguin Random House, Pearson and Oxford University Press. Camilla commissioned then managed Pearson’s best-selling reading programme, Bug Club. As a Senior Publisher at Oxford University Press Camilla was instrumental in developing Oxford Reading Buddy, a ground-breaking virtual reading service for primary schools. Today, we will be covering sound buttons. While your child learns to read phonics, you’ll probably come across words that are written like this, with dots and dashes underneath the letters: Teaching phonics can be quite daunting, both for you and your little one, therefore we want to help you every step of the way to make reading both fun and educational. That’s because each letter in ‘pumpkin’ makes a sound on its own – there are seven letters and seven sounds in the word. There are no digraphs, so no dashes!

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Your child’s teacher might ask your child to read words that have sound buttons, or to write sound buttons under a word. So how does it work? Being the very earliest stage box it is mainly about getting children interested in reading rather than starting to actually read (yet). It’s about laying the foundations for early reading. The quality of the materials is really good and the craft ideas are really good. What’s in the teddy box (3-4 years)

By far the best children’s subscription we’ve had (and we’ve done a lot of craft and baking ones previously). When I originally wrote my review for The Bear Can Read there were boxes for 2/3 year old, 3/4 year old’s, reception, year 1 & year 2. Now they’ve added an independent reader’s box as well. I originally brought the 3-4 year old’s box for Smallest Child (3 & 3 months) but I was also gifted a 2-3 year old’s box to compare the two. Now Smallest Child has started school we’ve set up our own subscription at the 4-5 years level. What’s in the cubs box? (2-3 years) If you look at ‘squirrel’ above, you’ll see that there is a dot or a dash under each sound in the word. The letter ‘s’ has a dot because it’s just one letter making one sound. The letters ‘i’, ‘e’ and ‘l’ have one dot each too, for the same reason. But ‘qu’ and ‘rr’ get a dash because those are both digraphs – two letters that make one sound together.As parents, we know how hard it can be to learn to read. So we set out to create simple, targeted worksheets and activities with phonics experts. We also ensure that the books are not only the newest and most engaging on the market but they specifically focus on the letters and sounds that the child is learning that month.