Reading Adventures - keeping the practice of reading alive over the summer
Reading in the summer: decodables
~Emily Furnival
Hi all! This year I really focused on ensuring that kids in Diamond Band were working on books that contained the phonics skills they had learned already. I wanted to share some of the resources and ideas I’ve compiled over the year for families who might want to practice reading over the summer. This isn’t at all requirements or a demand to fill your summer with drills – it’s just a set of resources to guide you if practicing literacy feels right for your family.
The first thing I want to emphasize is that learning to read is hard. It's a huge cognitive challenge to take symbols, turn them into sounds in your brain, and produce meaning! It's not something that's natural to the human brain like speaking is -- it takes a lot of practice and explicit instruction. Things that wouldn't bother experienced readers -- like smaller words or a lot of words on the page -- can derail an early reader. Things like reversals (switching letters the wrong way, or mixing up b and d) are common and developmentally appropriate for kids at this level. We're working to cement their directions, but nothing else they've ever encountered has changed meaning when reversed, so it's natural that kids assume that letters are the same.
Because it's so hard, we want to make sure that kids are only struggling in a way that is productive to them. That's why I'm having them read decodable books at school and want to send some options for home as well. Decodable books are books that are written specifically so almost every word in them follows the rules kids have learned so far.
General tips and tricks for reading with kids
Reading something "easy" is a great way to build fluency. Most kids at this age are still decoding most words manually -- practicing with easier texts that don't use every new rule they've learned gives them the chance to practice reading with inflection and comfort. It also lets them enjoy a story more, because they aren't using quite as much effort in decoding words. I promise I'll work on hard words with them -- they can do reading that feels fun at home!
Don't stress out if they don't love reading. Right now, reading doesn't feel like entering a magical world or hearing a great story for most of them. It feels more like learning a foreign language -- everything takes a lot of effort and time! My goal is to give them the skills they need to make reading easy enough to actually engage with the content they're reading.
It's natural for their comprehension and decoding skills to get worse after they've been reading for a while, or if they're tired.
If a word doesn't follow the rules they've learned, either tell them the word or tell them what sounds the irregular part of the word makes. For example, I might provide the word "they" because I want a kid to focus on the words they're practicing. Or I might say "e-y makes the sound ay in this word" and let them blend that with the th.
Reading a book isn't the only way to practice reading. Having kids read similar words (ie they read frog and flag, skip and stop, bake and bike), doing word work with letter tiles, or doing any of the roll and reads or home practice from UFli are all awesome as well. Reading to them and asking questions about a book helps them practice comprehension and textual analysis. There's great activities here for phonemic awareness, rhyming, and reading.
Stages of reading and activity ideas:
A big pre-reading goal that kids can easily identify all lowercase and uppercase letter with both the letter name and the sound it makes (usually). For vowels, you want them to produce the short sound (apple, egg, icky, octopus, umbrella). Vowels are tricky and a vowel staircase can help kids practice distinguishing short vowel sounds. Other great activities to practice are noticing rhymes and non-rhymes, identifying the first sound in a word, and brainstorming lists of rhymes and words that start with the same sound. It can and should be silly and fun!
Once kids can identify letters, you can start putting together CVC words (consonant-vowel-consonant, like cat or top). A great way to transition into cvc words is making sure that your words start with a continuous sound (/m/ or /s/ rather than /b/ or /p/. This helps kids stretch out the first sound and blend it with the vowel. At this stage, it’s really helpful to have the letters as individual manipulatable pieces (like tiles or cards), rather than unit of text on a page. The more kids can connect the change of a letter to the change of a sound in a word, the better! I made something like this to practice CVC words.
Once kids can easily read CVC words, they can begin decodable books! Starfall has great books – the first three are all CVC. When they’re comfortable with a sentence on a page, I highly recommend my FAVORITE books on this whole list – Monster and Friends: get blown away. This is an amazing book to have in their rooms. It is incredibly funny and will not contain any words that they can't decode. It is printed like a real book and gives kids such a feeling of accomplishment.
The next step is introducing digraphs (two letters that make a single sound) – like ch, th, and sh. A great book in the vein of Monster and Friends, but with digraphs, is Hot Chips, Mad Fish, and Other Tales. This is also a place to practice consonant blends (like bl, pr, or sk).
What I did next was introduce vowel + e (long vowel sounds). There’s a lot of different ways to engage kids with that – I liked having whiteboards for adding and erasing es. All the fiction sets I’ve added will have a vowel + e set for practice. Practicing with one letter sound (a+e) before moving to the next one is helpful!
After that, kids can work with r-controlled vowels, vowel teams, and more. There’s a lot of different options! What’s most important is explicit teaching, reviewing, and making sure kids can see each letter team and produce sounds. Kids will now be able to read a lot more decodable books in what they’re interested in.
This is also a great place to introduce morphology – suffixes like ing, ed, and prefixes. Kids have a lot of fun playing around with silly words from different bases and affixes.
A cool app that I found (though I haven’t tested it out yet) is Planet Lettra, which allows kids to put together words and parts of words to make real and nonsense words. This might be a fun place for kids with lots of different skill levels.
There's a few different types of mistakes kids make while reading. Here's how I try to respond to some common ones:
If the student guesses a word based on the first few letters, I say "Let's look at the word and sound out all the letters."
If a student mixes up a vowel sound, I say "Where are the vowel(s) in that word? What sound does that vowel make?" If they don't remember, tell them! If they've missed the silent e, I ask, is that the only vowel in that word? What does the e do?
If a student read "frog" as "fog," I would say, "You read the beginning, the end, and the middle correctly, but there's a consonant after the f that you missed." Being specific about what was correct and incorrect is really helpful.
Encouraging students to go back and reread the sentence when they figure out the new word, when possible. This is something that some students will resist and others won't, but it's really helpful!
Here is a big list of decodable books:
Free online resources:
Just Right Reader online resources (they also have print books if you enjoy them!). We are currently learning the vowel teams in sets 36-40, but feel free to try any of them.
Flyleaf Publishing -- free for the 22-23 school year. Really beautiful and enjoyable fiction and nonfiction books, we are up to about part 11. Also have printed books if you like them.
Chapter books:
Monster and Friends and Hot Chips and Mad Fish are super decodable, not full pages of text, look like a regular graphic novel. Both are awesome.
Yak Pak book -- comic book/graphic novel style, this one has vowel + e practice. Looks great for practicing fluency, fun designs and characters. There’s four sets with different levels.
Meg and Greg series. A fun option where not all the text is decodable, but every other page is a graphic novel style decodable page, and a lot of the other page is decodable as well. This book might be really nice for joint reading and to make practicing feel fun/connecting, and the story seemed more exciting than a lot I've seen! This book practices r-controlled vowels and there are other books with other focuses.
Quests and Dreams -- Soundblends series. I can't find a way to look inside but they have great reviews, lots of small chapters and some illustrations practicing different sounds.
Fiction sets:
Whole Phonics -- really funny and engaging stories and pictures. There's more words on the page, but all short vowel sounds -- could be helpful for practicing fluency/reading for meaning.
Dandelion Readers -- These are practicing the new vowel team sounds. They're full color, well illustrated, only a sentence or two on the page, but it seems like they have real stories.
Phonic Books Magic Belt series -- Such a cool series. A few sentences on each page, focusing on the spellings we're learning now, really plot-driven stories. For older kids.
Talisman Series -- A short paragraph on each page, all decodable with new spellings added. Super exciting stories with a strong plot, written for older students but great if you feel your child is looking for more engagement/plot.
Developing Readers Academy -- I have a set of these for r-controlled vowels. I don't absolutely love them (there's some repetition/guessing, and some non decodable words for no reason) but they're great focused practice on skills and kids feel really successful and enjoy reading them. Great for kids who love the feeling of having read "a whole book" in one sitting, you can even read a few in one sitting. Cheaper than other sets.
Express Readers -- we have the vowel + e set of these books. They're a little long, but with some silly stories kids can often enjoy.
Now I'm Reading -- purposefully repetitive, where each sentence builds complexity page by page. Good for practicing reading fluency. Smaller books that some kids love and others don't enjoy.
Non-fiction book sets!
Science Decodables by Junior Learning -- I finally found some non-fiction decodables!!! Great for kids who are more interested in learning facts. The sequencing system they use is different than the one I've used, so phase 3 will help practice some new sounds that we just learned or haven't learned yet, while phase 4 practices blends and phase 5 practices more new vowel sounds. The text also gets longer and adds more multisyllable words. I think phase 3 or 4 (or 5 for more fluent readers) would both be great for most kids, but I'm happy to give a more specific suggestion! They also have cool books that emphasize suffixes and prefixes. Their sound family nonfiction, with more complicated words, highlights the many spellings of specific sounds.
High Noon Sound Out nonfiction -- higher level, lots of cool sets of stories
Syllasense -- I have the set one before this set. I don't care for the fiction stories as much, but kids have been really enjoying the non-fiction -- cool animal stories with real photos. These are great books with a little bit of a challenge, adding multisyllabic words and suffixes.
Summer is a time of exploration and discovery, and it's a wonderful opportunity to embark on a reading adventure with your kids. By creating a nurturing environment, incorporating interactive activities, and fostering a love for books, we can ensure that young learners not only maintain their reading skills but also develop a lifelong passion for reading.
Happy reading!