Much More than Just a Set of D.O.G Books

Guest Author: Steve Shepherd and Samantha Meghawry

If you've only met Fizz and Pixel through the books, there's quite a bit more going on than you'd expect. The five stories sit inside something we call D.O.G. - Dedicated Online Guardians, built around digital safety, emotional resilience, critical thinking and trusted connection working together. 

Around that framework, we've built classroom session plans and facilitator packs so teachers can run the lessons without starting from scratch, alongside parent and carer resources designed to carry the same conversation home.

The thinking behind all of it stays consistent with the books themselves: Key Stage 1 first, rather than content adapted down from older age groups, story-led rather than lecture-led, and screen-free in how it's delivered. We're also working on a school licensing model, so the programme can scale into more classrooms without losing the quality control that comes from us being closely involved in every piece of it.

None of this happened to a plan drawn up in advance. It's grown the way most useful things do, one request at a time, from teachers asking for session plans, then parents asking for something to use at home, then schools asking how to license it properly. Each addition has been built to bridge school and home, so the same message reaches a child consistently, whoever happens to be delivering it that day. We're now looking at what a fuller Key Stage 1 offer looks like, with an eye on whether Key Stage 2 and 3 content makes sense further down the line.

Our first school pilot has just finished, and next week we'll share what it taught us, straight from the teachers and parents who lived it.