The Oxford Reading Tree is a series of books published by Oxford University Press, for teaching children to read using phonics. The series contains over 800 books. [1]
The "Biff, Chip and Kipper" stories, written by Roderick Hunt and illustrated by Alex Brychta, were used as the basis for the CBBC television programme The Magic Key and, in later years, the CBeebies television series Biff & Chip. The Oxford Reading Tree contains other series of books including "Floppy's Phonics", "Songbirds Phonics" by Julia Donaldson, and "Oxford Reading Tree inFact".
In 2022, the book The Blue Eye was withdrawn from sale following allegations of Islamophobia on social media. [2] [3] [4]
A kipper is a whole herring, a small, oily fish, that has been split in a butterfly fashion from tail to head along the dorsal ridge, gutted, salted or pickled, and cold-smoked over smouldering wood chips.
Whole language is a philosophy of reading and a discredited educational method originally developed for teaching literacy in English to young children. The method became a major model for education in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK in the 1980s and 1990s, despite there being no scientific support for the method's effectiveness. It is based on the premise that learning to read English comes naturally to humans, especially young children, in the same way that learning to speak develops naturally.
Phonics is a method for teaching reading and writing to beginners. To use phonics is to teach the relationship between the sounds of the spoken language (phonemes), and the letters (graphemes) or groups of letters or syllables of the written language. Phonics is also known as the alphabetic principle or the alphabetic code. It can be used with any writing system that is alphabetic, such as that of English, Russian, and most other languages. Phonics is also sometimes used as part of the process of teaching Chinese people to read and write Chinese characters, which are not alphabetic, using pinyin, which is alphabetic.
The Oblongs is an American adult animated sitcom created by Angus Oblong and Jace Richdale. It was Mohawk Productions' first venture into animation. The series premiered on April 1, 2001 on The WB, and cancelled due to low ratings on May 20, leaving the last five episodes unaired. The remaining episodes were later aired on Cartoon Network's late-night programming block Adult Swim in August 2002, with the series premiering on the network in production order. The series is loosely based on a series of characters introduced in a picture book entitled Creepy Susie and 13 Other Tragic Tales for Troubled Children.
Alexander Martin Clunes is an English actor, director and television presenter. He is best known for portraying Dr Martin Ellingham in the ITV comedy-drama series Doc Martin, Gary Strang in Men Behaving Badly, and William Shawcross in William and Mary. Clunes has narrated a number of documentaries for ITV, the first of which was Islands of Britain in 2009. He has since presented a number of documentaries centred on animals. He has also voiced Kipper the Dog in the animated series Kipper.
Pulpwood can be defined as timber that is ground and processed into a fibrous pulp. It is a versatile natural resource commonly used for paper-making but also made into low-grade wood and used for chips, energy, pellets, and engineered products.
Dick and Jane are the two main characters created by Zerna Sharp for a series of basal readers written by William S. Gray to teach children to read. The characters first appeared in the Elson-Gray Readers in 1930 and continued in a subsequent series of books through the final version in 1965. These readers were used in classrooms in the United States and in other English-speaking countries for nearly four decades, reaching the height of their popularity in the 1950s, when 80 percent of first-grade students in the United States used them. Although the Dick and Jane series of primers continued to be sold until 1973 and remained in use in some classrooms throughout the 1970s, they were replaced with other reading texts by the 1980s and gradually disappeared from school curricula.
Hooked on Phonics is a commercial brand of educational materials, originally designed for reading education through phonetics. First marketed in 1987, it used systematic phonics and scaffolded stories to teach letter–sound correlations (phonics) as part of children's literacy. The program has since expanded to encompass a wide variety of media, including books, computer games, music, videos, and flash cards in addition to books in its materials, as well as to include other subject areas. The target audience for this brand is primarily individuals and home school parents. The product was advertised extensively on television and radio throughout the 1990s.
Basal readers are textbooks used to teach reading and associated skills to schoolchildren. Commonly called "reading books" or "readers" they are usually published as anthologies that combine previously published short stories, excerpts of longer narratives, and original works. A standard basal series comes with individual identical books for students, a Teacher's Edition of the book, and a collection of workbooks, assessments, and activities.
Heston Marc Blumenthal is an English celebrity chef, TV personality and food writer. His restaurants include the Fat Duck in Bray, Berkshire, a three-Michelin-star restaurant that was named the world's best by the World's 50 Best Restaurants in 2005.
Julia Catherine Donaldson is an English writer and playwright, and the 2011–2013 Children's Laureate. She is best known for her popular rhyming stories for children, especially those illustrated by Axel Scheffler, which include The Gruffalo, Room on the Broom and Stick Man. She originally wrote songs for children's television but has concentrated on writing books since the words of one of her songs, "A Squash and a Squeeze", were made into a children's book in 1993. Of her 184 published works, 64 are widely available in bookshops. The remaining 120 are intended for school use and include her Songbirds phonic reading scheme, which is part of the Oxford University Press's Oxford Reading Tree.
Harry Potter is a series of seven fantasy novels written by British author J. K. Rowling. The novels chronicle the lives of a young wizard, Harry Potter, and his friends, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, all of whom are students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The main story arc concerns Harry's conflict with Lord Voldemort, a dark wizard who intends to become immortal, overthrow the wizard governing body known as the Ministry of Magic, and subjugate all wizards and Muggles.
Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree is a 1966 American animated musical fantasy short film based on the first two chapters of Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne. The film was produced by Walt Disney Productions, and released by Buena Vista Distribution on February 4, 1966, as a double feature with The Ugly Dachshund. It was the last short film produced by Walt Disney, who died of lung cancer on December 15, 1966, ten months after its release. Its songs were written by the Sherman Brothers and the score was composed and conducted by Buddy Baker.
Decodable text is a type of text often used in beginning reading instruction. Decodable texts are carefully sequenced to progressively incorporate words that are consistent with the letters and corresponding phonemes that have been taught to the new reader. Therefore, with this type of text new readers can decipher words using the phonics skills they have been taught. For instance, children could decode a phrase such as “Pat the fat rat” if they had been taught the letter-sound associations for each letter—that 'p' stands for the sound /p/, 'a' for the sound /a/, etc.
The Magic Key is a British educational animated television series based on the "Biff, Chip and Kipper" stories from the Oxford Reading Tree published by Oxford University Press, originally written by Roderick Hunt and illustrated by Alex Brychta. The series is a co-production between Collingwood O'Hare Entertainment Limited and HIT Entertainment, in association with the BBC and aired within the BBC Schools strand on BBC Two from 2000 until 2001.
Paper is a thin sheet material produced by mechanically or chemically processing cellulose fibres derived from wood, rags, grasses, or other vegetable sources in water, draining the water through a fine mesh leaving the fibre evenly distributed on the surface, followed by pressing and drying. Although paper was originally made in single sheets by hand, almost all is now made on large machines—some making reels 10 metres wide, running at 2,000 metres per minute and up to 600,000 tonnes a year. It is a versatile material with many uses, including printing, painting, graphics, signage, design, packaging, decorating, writing, and cleaning. It may also be used as filter paper, wallpaper, book endpaper, conservation paper, laminated worktops, toilet tissue, currency, and security paper, or in a number of industrial and construction processes.
Reading is the process of taking in the sense or meaning of letters, symbols, etc., especially by sight or touch.
Winnie-the-Pooh is a fictional anthropomorphic teddy bear created by English author A. A. Milne and English illustrator E. H. Shepard. Winnie-the-Pooh first appeared by name in a children's story commissioned by London's Evening News for Christmas Eve 1925. The character is inspired by a stuffed toy that Milne had bought for his son Christopher Robin in Harrods department store, and a bear they had viewed at London Zoo.
Alex Brychta is a British illustrator. He has collaborated with Roderick Hunt MBE on a series of children books for the Oxford Reading Tree, The Magic Key, which had an animated spin-off. There were 30 books in the first Oxford Reading Tree pack, and there are now over 400 total. They are used by over 80% of British primary schools to help children learn to read, as well as in schools in more than 120 other countries.
The Blue Eye is a 2001 children's adventure book by author Roderick Hunt and illustrator Alex Brychta that is part of the Oxford Reading Tree series. The book depicts the travels of two children, Biff and Wilf, in an unnamed Middle Eastern country as they help the princess Aisha regain a valuable stone called the Blue Eye.