A is for Arsenal. B is for Beckham. C is for Chelsea. It's hard to think of a more compelling vehicle for soccer-mad children to brush up on literacy skills than through spelling out the culture and practice of the game.
Which is why hundreds of children in London and beyond attend Arsenal Football Club's Double Club every week.
Arsenal, based in north London, beat Southampton to win the FA Cup Final at Cardiff Millennium stadium in May, but it was the team's double winning season - premier league and FA Cup - in 1998 that inspired Alan Sefton, head of Arsenal in the Community, to set up the Double Club to celebrate his side's triumphs and give something back to the community by helping children with their learning in schools.
Funding for the club comes from Britain's locally administered New Opportunities Funds.
'I've always passionately believed that soccer can have an influence on educating children,' says Sefton. 'We can make them more interested in learning through the game. So we go into schools and, knowing how teachers are overburdened as it is, provide them with a structured programme of 'gameified' materials to make it fun and volunteers who are attractive to children to help them.'
All the reading and writing in the programme is related to soccer and its luminous players, drawing on children's love of the game as well as their almost uncanny grasp of soccer facts, like the young fanatic in Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch. How on earth do seven- and eight-year-olds remember that it was Andy Cole who scored the winner for Blackburn against Tottenham to win the Worthington Cup for his new club? Who knows? But they do, and being able to apply that knowledge in a learning situation gives them a real surge of confidence.
The programme is delivered by young soccer-loving volunteers who work either alongside Double Club co-ordinator Scott Cohen, a former PE and maths teacher, or teachers from the school. The children do 45 minutes of reading and another 45 minutes of soccer to keep them sweet, give them exercise and learn skills.