Decodables: you can’t judge a book by its cover
6 RepliesMany mainstream educational publishers have recently started marketing decodable books, to meet fast-growing demand for phonics practice texts. Having bought and examined hundreds of these books, I’m excited by how many good options are now available. Here are photos of books we have at the Spelfabet office:
In general, publishers who produced decodables before there was a lucrative market for them tend to offer better phonics practice/lesson-to-text matching than less experienced publishers. However, all major publishers now seem to recognise that kids need to be taught to decode words, not guess and memorise them.
One problem with the term ‘decodable’ is that a book containing lots of sentences like “A dog is in the mud” and “Tim did not sit the dog in the tub” can be decoded by many young learners, but may not offer much practice of the book’s stated phonics targets. Just as an example, the new Flying Start to Literacy Decodables Unit 3 states its phonics targets as ‘b’, ‘j’, ‘q’, ‘v’, ‘w’, ‘x’ and ‘y’. The letter ‘j’ appears in three of the ten books (in a total of four words, as ‘job’ appears twice), ‘v’ appears in only two words (‘van’ once and ‘vet’ eight times), and ‘q’ doesn’t appear in any words at all.
It’s hard to write high-quality decodable text including low-frequency targets – there simply aren’t a lot of CVC words containing ‘j’ and ‘v’. I’d still argue that more words like ‘jam’, ‘jab’, ‘jog’, ‘jet’, ‘jig’, ‘jot’, ‘jut’, ‘Jed’, ‘Jan’, and/or ‘vat’ and perhaps some clipped words like ‘vac’, ‘Ev’, ‘Viv’, ‘Bev’ or ‘Kev’ would have improved a book targeting ‘j’ and ‘v’. I don’t know why ‘q’ is listed as a target.
Busy teachers should be able to judge a book by its cover, and not have to check whether the targets listed on books’ covers are in multiple words in the books.
I also wondered about similarities between some of the new Flying Start decodables and existing books from the same publisher. Here’s a photo of six of the covers of Unit 6 Flying Start to Literacy decodables:
Here are covers of other texts from the same publisher. The pictures on them appear in the above decodables.
It’s hard to write high-quality decodables, let alone write them to match illustrations from an existing book. ‘Dad’ in the new decodable ‘At Our Farm’ looks quite old to have such a young son (yes, I know Charlie Chaplin’s youngest child was born when he was 73). Being an Australian dairy farmer’s daughter, I wondered about the dairy, calf shed and hay shed all being called ‘barns’, not a term I’ve known Aussie farmers to use. Real farmers’ kids will also scratch their heads at a photo of the ‘farmer’s son’ offering grain to a calf that looks far too young to consume anything but milk.
Please check out decodables before you spend a lot of money on them. Read a few from each level, and consider how well they match your phonics teaching sequence. Think about whether they make sense, and offer value for money. A single book can cost anywhere between $2.70 (yay the Pocket Rockets by Berys from Moonee Ponds!) and about $13. If getting printables, don’t forget to include printing and collating materials and time in your cost calculations. Consider whether relevant training and other matching teaching resources are available, their cost and quality.
The last of the 2024 Spelfabet decodable book workshops aren’t going ahead due to caseload pressures and low enrolments, but if you want a tailored session to help you choose books for a specific person or purpose, please contact admin@spelfabet.com.au.
6 responses to “Decodables: you can’t judge a book by its cover”
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The Spelfabet shop has affordable, downloadable spelling teaching resources.
Great article!
I wish the people who introduced PLD at my school did this before buying into the program. Quality decodables are so important and it is extremely frustrating to be told to use something ‘decodable’ from a program when it is not quality and does not match the sequence well. I wish all programs labelled as ‘structured synthetic phonics’ used decodables that had:
– clear small step progression of phonics (e.g. 1 or two new sounds per book)
– multiple opportunities to practice the focus sounds
– no (or very minimal) inclusion of phonics that is not a previous book focus
– exactly follows the phonics sequence of the program
– practice word lists that match the book focus
I love the ‘Phonic Book’s’ series for these reasons. I also love how much variety there is.
Thank you for sharing your expertise! You have been a wonderful help and resource for me over the last few years!
I found a letter I wrote when I was seven, and it was in the lovely loopy cursive. I say lovely because loops are the physically easiest way to write. Each word is just one ‘line’, so lifting the pencil off the page only happens when the complete word has been written. The dots for i and j are added before going on to the next word..
The biggest advantage of loops is that going up for each letter needs a lighter pencil pressure, and going down a slightly slower, stronger one, giving handwriting a natural rhythm. The hand muscles don’t get tired. Loops importantly avoid the need to trace over the same ascending line on the way down, or having to lift the pencil unnecessarily off the page in the middle of a word.
Sliding the hand across the page on the curved little finger and 4th finger means that the whole hand maintains its pencil-holding tripod position for the whole page of writing, making the physical part of handwriting flexible, fluent and even.
For the pencil/pen tripod grip, I teach my beginners, ‘Thumb and pointer up on top; all the rest curl down below’, and, The thumb and pointer hold the pencil and have a lot of movement that comes all the way from the wrist, so the tip goes to where you want it to go.’
In more detail while demonstrating … ‘The pencil rests on tall man to keep things steady and to help the thumb and pointer do the moving. The whole side of the hand and pinky rest on the page to slide along to give you good view of the pencil tip as you write so you don’t have to twist your hand or turn you head sideways. Hold the pencil/pen about two cm above the writing tip.’
This loopy method is virtually effortless. No hard finger gripping or hand contortions are necessary, and beautiful, legible handwriting is the result.
What is the Phonics Books series? Could you provide a link as it looks like there are several out there with this name?
Sorry, I thought I had included a link. Phonic Books is a UK publisher which was recently bought by DK Learning: http://www.phonicbooks.co.uk, or if you speak American English the relevant site is: http://www.phonicbooks.com.
None of these books will be 100% decodable so what is a parent to do? Tell them the words that don’t know?!
Preteach the words children don’t know, the high-quality books all list them (as high-frequency words or story words) either at the start or end of the book. It’s almost impossible to write a book that makes sense in the early stages without a few words containing more difficult spellings than the ones in the phonics teaching sequence. That’s OK, there aren’t a huge number of words that have more than one unusual sound-spelling relationship. All the best, Alison