What are Decodable Readers?

A decodable reading book is a book that only contains phonetics that a child has already learnt. For instance, a child starting out in the earliest stages of reading who has learnt the sounds s / a / t / p, would be able to decode words in a book such as at, sat, tap, and pat. Therefore, the decodable book would only contain these words and would not introduce any unfamiliar letters and sounds.

The Beanstalk Books Decodable Readers range are all 100% decodable. Our reading program is designed to help children build on their reading success and feel a sense of accomplishment as they work their way through each decodable story. Each set of books follows children week-by-week through the program providing them text-based context to practice their emerging reading skills. Every story in both the fiction, and non-fiction range of books, has been written with a strictly controlled text.  

The Beanstalk Books scope and sequence is a phonics-  based reading program designed to teach the letter patterns of the English language, with the aim of helping children become fluent readers by the age of seven. The program follows a systematic progression, where children are introduced letters in a specific order (s, a, t, p, i, n, m) and are encouraged to build words and play with these sounds.

The Beanstalk Books sequence accepts that there are a number of common exception words (heart words or tricky words) in the English language and many of these words are high frequency and appear in early reading. As such, these highly-frequent exception words have been incorporated into the Scope and Sequence, so that children can become familiar with these ‘oddball’ words within the progression. Here children are encouraged to decode (sound out) the regular parts of a common exception word, but must learn by rote the correct pronunciation based on the whole word form.

The key to Beanstalk Books program is the 6-part phase progression on which it is built. Overall, the detailed phase by phase program can be introduced from Pre-K/Grade K in terms of development of phonemic awareness, built upon with the introduction of letter sounds, move onto more complex spelling patterns in Grade 1, and finally move onto spelling rules in Grade 2. Beanstalk Books sequence teaches suffixes at Phase 6 and naturally follows on to punctuation and grammar instruction.

 How the books are used

Each book has been carefully written according to the letter sound progression and follows a specific order, so children know all the letter sounds and are able to decode the text. Quick reference to the letter sounds explicitly taught are provided on the cover, along with the book number in the series. After letter sounds have been explicitly taught, decodable readers are used to apply newly forming letter sound skills in the context of reading.

The inside front cover provides the phase progression of letter sounds in grid format. Cells filled in black display letter sounds that are explicitly introduced in the decodable reader. Cells in black text have been previously taught. Cells after the black-filled cells will be explicitly introduced in future readers. 

There are some exceptions of course, where a high-frequency word that is not easily decodable might be used in a story, for example: the, is, to, no. These words are known as Heart Words, Common Exception Words or tricky words. Each non-decodable word is listed on the inside inner cover of the book that they are featured in.

Decodable readers are different to non-decodable readers. Children will not need to rely on using the context of the story to try to read a word. They will acquire the tools to sound out each part of the words in front of them. All of Beanstalk Books decodable books carry a good story. Both fiction and non-fiction titles enable building comprehension skills, picture-to-text match and enable pre-reading discussion and prediction.