About Reading with Roy the Zebra

Roy the zebra is a free resource that’s all about supporting emerging readers with their literacy skills, it’s used at schools and at home. This site is a great introduction to the kind of content you’ll find on our membership site Club Roy.

This site is home to an engaging range of reading, spelling, and punctuation games, as well as an exciting guided reading story, lesson plans, printable resources and even songs - it’s totally free for you to use, all that we ask is that you register with us so that you can receive occasional updates via email.

Roy is aimed at 5 to 7 year-olds. It’s often used as a tool to support readers who aren’t progressing as expected - giving these readers an interesting and different resource builds their reading and spelling confidence and helps to establish an early ‘love for reading’.

If you like the content on this free site then consider becoming a member of Club Roy.

Our guided reading story, adventure, suspense and humour…

Tale of a Singing Zebra is about Roy the zebra, he lives in the worst zoo in the world, locked up next door to his best friend Lucy the elephant. They dream of the wild. When George visits the zoo, he’s sad for Roy and he thinks how he can help.

The nine mini-chapter story is an exciting, humorous and daring tale of Roy’s escape and his adventures with George in search of the herd. Each chapter comes with before and after discussion sheets, optional narration, as-well-as a printable reading certificate and is iPad compatible.

Roy and George return in Operation Rescue Lucy, the mission to return Lucy to the wild. You can read it at Club Roy.

Engaging games and lesson plans

You’ll find a wide variety of iPad compatible reading, punctuation and spelling games, from full stops and capital letters through to spelling CVC words and vowel digraphs and using singular and plural words. All the games use the fun characters from the Roy stories; they’re quick to access, easy to play, engage with your early readers and come with a lesson plan.

About Club Roy

Club Roy is our membership site. It has 149 reading, spelling and punctuation games over 13 different topics and 16 game themes, Operation Rescue Lucy guided reading story plus more than 700 printable resources and is advert free. Club Roy aims to be an affordable resource to complement school reading systems and can be used at home as well.

The team behind www.roythezebra.com and Club Roy

Tim Bowerbank
Passionate about literacy, illustrator, writer and coder. The creator of Roy the zebra.

Emma Bowerbank
Creative, exceptional coder, and trained teacher.

Sue Bowerbank
Early years teacher for more than 40 years, advisor for game content, writer of engaging lesson plans plus design of printable resources.

Testimonials

Here are some testimonials made by teachers via our surveys.

“A fun site that I shall be using more and more in the future and I intend to pass it on to other staff.”

“Thanks…very good site. I have designed some curricula myself and it’s rare to find such a “step-by-step” reading program with no holes in it. You can literally go on from one point to the next. “

“I really love this! The story is very appealing and my year 1 pupil, in particular, really likes it. I teach individual pupils and this has enabled me to keep lessons fresh and fun. I am delighted with the worksheets too! More like this please!!”

“I think the story is great for young children. I love the interesting games and the worksheets. They really target reading and reading for enjoyment. The feedback for errors is instant in the IT games. Great work.”

“A fun way to encourage reluctant readers in both decoding and comprehension.”

“…it is a very good initiative for struggling readers”

“…children thoroughly enjoy the story, worksheets and games. They are willing and able now to predict what might happen next and are beginning to write their own sections independently.”

“…Thank you so much for such a wonderful site for getting students excited about reading. The students had high interest in the story and I found it so easy to get them to do some higher order thinking and predicting with this story.”

“…fun, website with tremendous potential. Children forget they are learning!”

“…This is a very useful and fun site. My first graders love it and so do I!”

“Thanks for the sacred job you are doing!”

“The children really like the interactive games. Well done for tackling all the awkward lit objectives - a great site thanks”

“…great story full of fine humour and witty puns all my young pupils LOVE it and want to read on… THANK YOU!”

Credits

Tim’s business Fort Marketing created the website. Find out more at Fort Marketing.