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 Letters & Sounds Decodable Readers range are 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 Letters & Sounds series of books follows children week-by-week through the programme 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 Letters & Sounds is a phonics-based reading programme 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 programme follows a systematic progression, where children are introduced letters in a specific order (s, ɑ, t, p, i, n, m) and are encouraged to build words and play with these sounds.

The Beanstalk Books Letters & Sounds accepts that there area number of common exception words (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 Letters & Sounds progression is the 6-part phase progression on which it is built. Overall, the detailed phase by phase programme can be introduced from Nursery/Reception in terms of development of phonemic awareness, built upon with the introduction of letter sounds, move onto more complex spelling patterns in Year 1, and finally move onto spelling rules in Year 2. Beanstalk Books Letters & Sounds teaches suffixes at Phase 6 and naturally follows on to punctuation and grammar instruction.