It was a lazy Sunday afternoon. My son suddenly asked me how to spell men. But without waiting for my answer, he flexed his knowledge of it.

I speak Mandarin to my son, so I was duly impressed with how his teachers at the childcare centre have been building up his literacy skills. Obliged to pull in my weight, I asked him to spell related words, such as Ben, den, ten, and even Zen. He was mostly able to spell the words, proving that he is starting to get a firm grasp of phonics.

Motivated to pump in the momentum, I signed up for Decordable Reads.. It is a website that empowers parents and teachers to select the phonics they would want to focus on for their kiddos and students and have it generate customised stories for them.

It does require you to have some knowledge of phonics, though the main areas of phonics are clearly laid out via boxes, ready to be deployed for your dopamine creating frenzy.

I checked the VC box because it is closest to the -en rime. I then leveraged my prompt engineering know-how and typed in this prompt: 3 penguins Ten, Jen and Zen go into a den and pick up a pen.

This was the story DecordableReads generated for my son:

Ten, Jen, and Zen are penguins. The three pals go to a den. It is a big den.

"Let us go in," Ten tells them.

"Yes!" Jen and Zen yell.

The penguins hop in the den. It is dim in the den. Ten, Jen, and Zen see all they can.

"I see a box!" Ten shouts.

The box is red. Jen lifts the lid. In the box is a pen!

"A pen!" Zen yells. "Can we get it?"

"Yes," Ten tells them. "Let us get the pen."

Jen gets the pen. It is a big pen.

"The pen is fun," Zen tells them. "We can use it."

Ten, Jen, and Zen are glad. They hop from the den with the pen.

"Let us go to our hut," Ten tells them.

The three pals go to their hut. They like the pen they got in the den.

Word of caution: you got to use this platform judiciously because it only allows you ten free tries. Otherwise, you can become a paid subscriber.

I then planted the story onto Invideo AI. Unfortunately, the video it generated didn’t show me images of penguins venturing inside a dim, dark den and ecstatically picking up a pen. I guess such specific imagery would have been too much to ask for.

Lastly, I created a podcast with the help of Wondercraft. Surely, my boy would be pleased with my gargantuan effort!