How the books are used

The Letters & Sounds Decodable Readers range are 100% decodable. Each Letters & Sounds series follows children week-by-week through the program providing them text-based context to practice their emerging ready skills. Every story in both the fiction, and non-fiction range of books, has been written with a strictly controlled text. Children are only exposed to words and text that is decodable (can be sounded out), based on the letter-to-sound correspondences already learned. High frequent or tricky words have been incorporated into the progression where it is deemed appropriate.

In each title, only the words using the sounds already learnt would be used in the book title. There are some exceptions of course, where a high-frequency word that is not easily decodable might be used in a story. These words are called ‘tricky words’, for example: the, is, to, no. Each tricky 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.