Books for Children Learning to Read
- amiller8979
- Feb 7
- 2 min read
by Amber Miller
February 7, 2025
As children begin to gain the knowledge and skills they need to read on their own, we continue to read aloud to them to develop oral language and listening comprehension skills, but we also want to give them opportunities for practice with books they can read on their own. Research supports a mix of text types for young children, so when choosing books for your beginning readers, you'll want to consider your purpose.
Decodable Texts
If your purpose is the application of phonics instruction, a decodable text is the best choice. Decodable texts have a high concentration of words that are easily decodable by the reader based on the phonics patterns they know. Well-designed decodable texts include examples of words with a target feature (e.g., words with the ee pattern) and follow a phonics scope and sequence. This means the book considers which features the child has already learned and which they haven't. For example, the book may include words with all these patterns if the student is working on the ee pattern and has already learned the a_e, i_e, o_e, and u_e patterns. It shouldn't contain words with patterns like ai, ou, or oo if they haven't been introduced. Since the focus is on the words, decodable texts often do not have rich vocabulary or plots (some are better than others). However, beginning readers are usually still motivated to read these books because they feel empowered by their ability to read the words themselves without assistance. Flyleaf Publishing publishes one example of high-quality decodable texts.
These decodable texts are currently available online for free here.
Easy Reader Trade Books
Young readers are also likely to be interested in reading trade books. These books are typically inappropriate for phonics instruction because they are generally not designed to be fully decodable or to provide practice with a specific phonics feature. However, these books may be appropriate for children to read independently, especially once they have begun to build a substantial bank of sight words (words recognized automatically).
One more note about supporting students as they read trade books: even though these are not decodable books, the scaffolding you provide, if students struggle with a word, should still encourage them to use decoding strategies when possible. Encouraging students to guess an unknown word based on the illustration or the first letter is not good practice. Sometimes, best practice is to tell the student what the word is. Consider these suggestions for scaffolding:
Finding Easy Readers
コメント