Recent research in literacy acquisition has led to an elaboration of instructional programmes that focus on supporting children's progress through successive developmental levels. An example of such an approach is "analogy instruction," the basis of which is that children develop a system of recognition of shared patterns within words and strategies for applying them to reading and spelling in context. This study evaluated the implementation of a modified analogy strategy-based programme. A group of Y3 and 4 children with reading and spelling difficulties were taught, for eight weeks, specific phonological skills and analogy strategies for reading and spelling. The key finding was that the intervention significantly improved children's letter-sound knowledge, phonemic awareness decoding (non-word reading), and invented spelling skills compared with that of a control group. This finding suggests that an analogy strategy-based programme may be effective in improving children's decoding and encoding skills.