Practice Readers Books Blog

Image Credit: istock/tolgart A recent conversation I had with Kathryn Garforth of the Right to Read Initiative got me thinking (again) about what parents need to know about text selection for their beginning readers. There is a lot of opaque terminology floating around that can be difficult to make sense of as an outsider to the world of literacy education. I hope this Guide for Parents will help you navigate some of the language or issues you may have come across.   Is Decoding the same thing as Reading? First of all, people tend to use the term reading in...

Celebrate I Read Canadian Day with a reading of Letter Sounds Abound by author C. S. Young!

Originally posted July 11, 2022 on Satisfaction for Insatiable Readers My favorite words for a beginning reader would be the ones that allow them to practice the alphabetic knowledge they have (decode) to develop fluency, and those words that help them unlock a new aspect of the alphabetic code. The term ‘beginner reader’ is pretty general and can mean a lot of different things to different people. When writing books for beginners I often lean on Linnea Ehri’s phases of word learning, as the phases are readily recognizable and help me imagine how a book will be read. I believe...