Phonics-Based Reading and Writing

One of our key goals with the Reading Platform and Reading Tree (OKA) was to ensure that our book series and all related materials fully align with the Turkish primary school language curriculum set by the Ministry of National Education. In this context, we have created our Phonics series consisting of 18 books, including introductory and concluding stories, to accompany students on their journey to learn reading and writing. In addition, we have prepared learning materials that are related to these stories. This way, we enhanced our platform that fosters book-based learning—an approach where stories inspire both literacy and broader curriculum engagement. With our phonics series, we aimed to achieve the following objectives: 1. To help students learn letters-sound correspondence within a meaningful context, thus providing learning activities that are more engaging and relevant. 2. To introduce new letters through stories, ensuring that related learning materials—such as booklets and supplementary reading texts—are directly connected to those stories, thereby supporting deeper and longer-lasting learning. 3. To enrich students’ general knowledge through stories that not only teach reading and writing but also introduce important events and figures from world history. 4. To provide teachers with a flexible structure that allows them to customize activities and materials and address the students with different learning levels within their classrooms. The most distinctive feature of our series is that, it does not rely on disconnected texts with unrelated content during the process of learning literacy. Instead, each of the 18 books introduces letters through stories framed within a cohesive narrative that also broadens students’ cultural awareness. Standard literacy activities are likewise tied to these stories, grounding the learning process in a meaningful context. In this way, we aim to increase students’ curiosity and motivation for learning to read and write while ensuring their learning experience is longer-lasting and enjoyable. In addition, we developed a “Material Creation” tool for teachers, allowing them to tailor activities to their students’ needs. This feature supports one of the key goals of our Reading Platform: to address varying learning levels within the same classroom.