Spelfabet

Decodables: you can’t judge a book by its cover

Many 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.

Choosing a phonics sequence & decodable books

Phonics teaching sequences give an outline of which sound-spelling relationships are to be taught, and in what order. Most of them also include work on word-building with prefixes and suffixes. Schools in my state (Victoria, Australia) without a phonics teaching sequence must choose one this year, thanks to the Making Best Practice Common Practice announcement (applause).

A good phonics sequence works from simple to complex, separating similar sounds/spellings (like b/d), and targeting high-impact patterns first. Ideally, there are matching, high-quality teaching materials, and excellent training and support, readily available at a reasonable price.

Decodable texts allow children to practise what they’ve been taught in phonics lessons, without being tripped up by a whole lot of harder spellings. What we practise, we learn. The type of reading material given to young children can have at least as big an impact on their reading habits as what they’re taught in class (see this article, or this book), so decodable texts must be chosen carefully and wisely. This blog post aims to help with this decision-making.

Things supplier websites won’t tell you

Supplier websites provide lots of great information about decodables, but don’t say that some books offer limited opportunities to practise some targets, or include words that are quite hard for their intended readership. The ERA Books Phonics Decodables 1.0 and 1.1 Set 4 books ($8.95 each, so $35.80 for all 4) list ‘k’, ‘h’, ‘f’, ‘l’ and ‘j’ as letter-sound targets. The words suitable for absolute beginners in these four books are: ‘Kim’, ‘Kip’, ‘kid’, ‘him’, ‘had’, ‘hen’, ‘hug’, ‘hat’, ‘fit’, ‘fun’, ‘fed’, ‘lid’, ‘log’, ‘Jim’, ‘jam’, ‘jug’, and ‘jet’ (17 unique words, 44 total words). Some other words also contain the targets, but in difficult-for-beginners CVCC, CVCC, CCVCC or CVCCC* words: ‘help’, ‘frog’, ‘fits’, ‘lift’, ‘just’, ‘sink’, ‘help’, ‘milk’, ‘flips’, ‘lifts’, ‘jumps’ and ‘like’.

The Sunshine Decodables Series 1 Set 3 book “Mud fun” lists the following targets on its back cover: ‘c’, ‘k’, ‘ck’, ‘j’, ‘qu’, ‘v’, ‘w’, ‘y’, ‘z’, ‘zz’, ‘ff’, ‘ll’, and ‘ss’. The only words containing these spellings I can find in the book are: ‘van’, ‘will’, ‘job’, ‘off’, ‘wets’, ‘wax’, and ‘kids’. No ‘c’, ‘ck’, ‘qu’, ‘y’, ‘z’, ‘zz’, or ‘ss’ words. The only ‘y’ words I can find in all ten Set 3 books are: ‘yes’ (two instances), and ‘yum’ (one instance). I wonder why they couldn’t work ‘yam’, ‘yap’, ‘yell’, ‘yet’ and ‘yuck’ in too. Writing good decodable books is hard work, and everyone who attempts it deserves some credit, but (call me old-fashioned) the phonics targets listed on the back of a book should actually be in that book, and in more than one or two words.

Free decodable book evaluation form

I’ve made a free decodable book evaluation form which I use in the 45 minute video below to evaluate a few of the many books which follow the Letters and Sounds phonics teaching sequence. This sequence was published by the UK government in 2007. I hope the form and video are useful to anyone feeling baffled by the confusopoly of decodable books now available, and needing a system to help them find lovely books that help their learners thrive. Sorry it’s quite a long video. If you’re time-poor and fairly familiar with the topic, crank up the speed using the little cog at bottom right, then just switch it back to normal speed for the most interesting bits. Making people sound like chipmunks also adds a bit of fun to the day.

Here are some examples of early years phonics teaching sequences, with links to matching decodable books and training providers. There’s no such thing as a perfect sequence, so please explore a variety of them, and related teaching materials and training, before choosing. Inclusion in this table does not constitute endorsement.

If you have a mixture of decodable books from various publishers/sequences, the NSW SPELD decodable book selectors can help you organise them into your preferred sequence. There’s also a free video training called Implementing a Systematic Synthetic Phonics approach on the government-funded Literacy Hub website, which has its own phonics sequence, but no decodable texts. Jocelyn Seamer runs early years phonics training and has program-agnostic resources. Free recordings of 2018 Victorian Dept of Ed webinars on synthetic phonics and related topics are also still available. The Five from Five website is also an amazing resource.

I hope all this is helpful to people choosing a phonics teaching sequence. I’m running small, hands-on workshops where you can have a Proper Look at a range of decodable books at the Spelfabet office in North Fitzroy this term, and try out my evaluation form on some (here’s the link to it again). Sorry it’s taken a while to get the workshops off the ground (life keeps thwacking me). Tickets to the sessions are not yet all in the website shop because of software glitches, but they will be by the end of the week.

Alison Clarke

PS The Spelfabet shop doesn’t sell decodable books suitable for absolute beginners, but has beginners’ quizzes, and Phonics with Feeling download-and-print decodables for kids in their second and third years of school (or later Foundation students). Also embedded picture mnemonics to help tinies learn basic sound-letter relationships, that two letters can represent a sound (sh/shell, oo/food), and that some sounds have shared spellings e.g. u/up (or u/undies, if you prefer) and u/unicorn.

^{* C = consonant, V = vowel. VC words include ‘in’, ‘at’ and ‘up. CVC words include ‘hot’, ‘sun’ and ‘fed’. CVCC words include ‘milk’, ‘help’ and ‘just’. CCVC words include ‘stop’, ‘from’, and ‘bent’. CCVCC words include ‘flips’, ‘trend’ and ‘stamp’. CVCCC words include ‘jumps’, ‘lifts’ and ‘grabs’. Please start beginners off with just VC and CVC words.}

_{** Sounds-Write now has Australian and US branches.}

Autonomy’s great if it delivers success

The Australian Education Union dislikes our state’s new requirement to teach explicit, systematic, synthetic phonics in the early years, saying teachers already do phonics, must not be told how to do their jobs, weren’t properly consulted, and won’t cooperate. However, many teachers, including AEU members, are pleased by this new requirement. They see it as a vital social justice measure and a way to cut teacher workloads, and are disappointed by the AEU’s response.

I’m not sure why being told to do something you already do is a problem. Everyone is told how to do their jobs, including self-employed folk like me. I’m working on my Speech Pathology Australia Certification, and must comply with Fair Work, NDIS, Medicare, ATO and many other requirements.

The reading/learning science movement has been growing like topsy for years, so I’d be surprised if Education Ministers and the AEU haven’t had plenty of discussions about how to best teach literacy. Having been a union rep myself, I’d be amazed if AEU members went to the barricades to defend teaching approaches which lack strong evidence, or the resulting high differentiation workloads.

Teacher autonomy (not evidence-based practice) gets top priority in the recently-updated AEU Pedagogy Policy. Perhaps whoever invited Barbara Arrowsmith-Young to speak at the AEU office in 2017 led the policy review process. Has teacher autonomy been working well for this state’s struggling readers, and their teachers, who have a right to do high-quality work, and to see their students succeed?

New VAGO report

A new state Auditor-General (VAGO) report says our Education Department isn’t getting good value for the $1.2 billion dollars being spent over five years on its Tutor Learning Initiative. There’s substantial evidence (e.g. here and here) that high-quality, intensive small group intervention can help struggling readers catch up. Across the state in 2023, tutored kids’ test scores increased more than the median increase for all kids (great!), but less than matched kids who weren’t tutored (oh dear).

I’m sure many skilled, experienced tutors who understand reading/learning research provided high-quality intervention in many schools, and their students made a lot of progress. But what were tutors doing elsewhere? Balanced literacy (a balance of things that work and things that don’t)? Other ineffective programs/approaches? VAGO says tutoring was generally timely, but there were problems with targeting intervention, and making it appropriate to school context and student need. Workforce problems mainly affected secondary and F-12 schools.

VAGO concludes that many schools’ tutoring was not effective, and recommends a statewide, staged roll-out of effective programs. Data the Education Department already collects should be used to drive improvement. Absolutely.

What does good intervention look like?

Most kids who struggle to read and write have difficulty at the word level. Kids’ word-level reading and spelling improves when they do a LOT of well-targeted and sequenced reading and writing practice. If watching a Tutor Learning Initiative literacy session, I’d mainly want to see kids with eyes on text (in books, games, whatever) as they read aloud, or pencils in hand, writing, then reading back what they’ve written. I’d want to see tutors providing well-organised and sequenced, fast-paced work with immediate feedback and encouragement. They’d be helping kids get their reps up, and slam-dunk words into long-term memory for instant retrieval and thus fluency.

Take a look at the 90 second video about the Tutor Learning Initiative here: www.vic.gov.au/tutor-learning-initiative. I see children walking, sitting, talking, smiling … but can you see any children reading or writing? What does this mean? I’m not sure, but I’d promote this initiative with a very different video.

System support for the best teaching and learning

The AEU’s submission to our recent state government inquiry into education says on p2:

“Geoffrey Robertson KC correctly argues that “a real revolution in education will only come when a government ensures that its state schools set the standard of excellence. Then and only then will we have equity.” The idea of equality draws on notions that all people in our society are of equal value. This democratic principle is crucial to underpinning the provision of public schooling. Only through proper and fair funding of our schools and a system focused on supporting school staff to provide the best teaching and learning programs that then (sic) we can achieve equity.”

Typo/grammar aside, I couldn’t agree more. It’s time to close the school funding gap. I hope the Federal Next Steps report ensures that future Initial Teacher Education graduates know how to teach reading and spelling fast and well. I hope ongoing Tutor Learning Initiative improvements, and implementation of the VAGO report’s recommendations, help stacks of struggling kids catch up with their peers in 2025. And I hope AEU members can persuade their leaders that early, explicit, systematic phonics is (to paraphrase Snow and Juel) helpful to all children and their teachers, harmful to none, and crucial for some, and that autonomy to wander in the literacy pedagogy wilderness is highly overrated.

25 minutes a day in F-2 so everyone can read!

Melbourne newspaper The Age is holding its Schools Summit, you can find their blog about this here.

The big announcement from this summit is that explicit teaching of systematic, synthetic phonics in the first three years of school will be required of all Victorian schools from 2025. Here’s a screenshot from the Premier’s media release entitled “Making best practice common practice in the Education State”:

An article The way children are taught to read in Victoria is about to change provides more detail, but it’s pay-walled if you’re not an Age subscriber. If you are, please make time to leave a comment. Here’s mine:

Kudos to Education Minister Ben Carroll for learning about reading research, and acting on it. Everyone in education and beyond will benefit when all children are taught to read and write in the most effective, efficient way, especially children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

A win for kids and teachers

This announcement must be implemented in a pro-teacher way, recognising the yawning gap in language knowledge in most teacher preparation degrees, and the vast amount of work so many teachers have done in their own time to upskill themselves and others, and get us to this point (yes, Sharing Best Practice, Reading Science In Schools, TFE, SPELDs, LDA, SOTLA, Berys Dixon and Maureen Pollard, I’m looking at you).

This decision should give early years teachers faster success teaching all children to read and write, especially those who struggle. It should reduce later years teachers’ differentiation workloads. Fewer parents will have to spend money on intervention outside school. Fewer kids whose parents can’t afford intervention will miss out on quality teaching about our complex writing system. More success for all means better behaviour and less class disruption. This announcement should help block the school-to-prison pipeline.

I’ve been doing little happy dances about the announcement all morning, but this is only the beginning. The hard work of implementation starts now.

Helping schools choose quality phonics practice texts

Practice makes permanent, so schools need to choose high-quality, good-value phonics practice texts, and make them available to all F-2 children. Our North Fitzroy office is about the only place in Victoria where a wide range of decodable books suitable for F-2 are on display. Next term, I’ll be running small (up to 12 people) three-hour workshops about them on Wednesdays and Thursdays after school, and fortnightly on Saturdays.

There are also a couple of 22nd June workshops for people needing urgent help getting value for EOFY unspent cash, and some workshops for interventionists, librarians, adult educators and parents. I hope this is a useful way to support implementation of this important announcement, and ensure children are given quality phonics practice texts, and Victorians’ money is spent wisely. All the dates and times are on the workshops page, where tickets will be available soon.

Let’s set kids up for success

Finally, I’ve been thinking about the article “The way we teach most children to read sets them up to fail” Prof Pamela Snow and I co-wrote in the Conversation in 2015. Let’s hope everyone in the education system can now work together to ensure all children are taught to read in a way that sets them up for success.

Alison Clarke

Summer holiday groups at Spelfabet

Bookings are now open for our intensive explicit, systematic synthetic phonics therapy groups in the week of 15-19 January 2024.

These are for young children (in school Years F-2 in 2023) who need extra help with learning to read and spell words by sounding them out.

Each group will run for an hour a day, and include plenty of games and fun. We will provide daily homework to complete and bring to the next session.

The groups will be:

We will provide all the necessary resources, including specialist take-home readers. We have a maximum of four children per speech pathologist in our groups, to keep the pace/intensity high. We match children carefully and ask that everyone comes prepared to attend all sessions and do all the homework.

Our groups will be held at our North Fitzroy office in Melbourne’s inner north, with attendance by appointment only. Spaces are limited, and upfront payment for all group sessions is required to secure a child’s place.  The cost of a week’s program is $720, which covers all sessions, materials and planning time, plus a brief final report with recommendations. Missed sessions are non-refundable. Private health rebates may apply, depending on your level/type of cover, but Medicare only provides rebates for individual therapy sessions.

Children not already known to us need to attend an assessment session with us before joining a group. This allows us to check whether we have a suitable group, and helps us cater for any special needs/interests. If we don’t have a group matching a child’s skills and needs, we can usually suggest other intervention options.

Please contact Tiana Knights on admin@spelfabet.com.au, (03) 8528 0138 or text 0434 902 249 if you’d like to find out more about these groups, or book an assessment for a struggling reader/speller.

Embedded Picture Mnemonic bookmarks and desk mats

Help beginners link speech sounds and letters/spellings with our new, printable embedded picture mnemonic bookmarks and desk mats.

The bookmarks are single-sided, with one mnemonic for each letter of the alphabet. Five print to an A4 page. Save, print, laminate and cut up for distribution to literacy beginners. If/when some are lost/damaged, just print extras.

The desk mats have the alphabet on one side, and a mnemonic for each of the other sounds on the flip side. Print just the first side for beginners, or both sides to show learners that there are more sounds than letters, so many are written with letter combinations.

There are three versions, to suit different accents and preferences, all with the new y/yawn mnemonic:

• A version for most Australian, UK, NZ and other speakers of non-rhotic Englishes, with e/egg, k/key, o/orange, u/up, ur/surf, air/hair and ear/gears.
• A more Aussie version as above, but with k/kangaroo and u/undies (yes! back by popular demand).
• A version for US, Canadian and other speakers of rhotic accents, with e/echo, k/key, o/octopus, u/up, wh/whale, ur/burn, and aw/claw, but no air/hair or ear/gears.

Prices assume each purchaser will print enough for their class/caseload.

We hope you like them!

The Language, Learning and Literacy conference – Kathy Rastle

Kathy Rastle was another keynote speaker at last week’s great Language, Literacy and Learning conference whose topic is directly relevant to this blog.

You might remember her as a co-author of last year’s influential paper about Ending the Reading Wars, and of this related article (both highly recommended reading).

Hers was the final keynote of the conference, but I met her on the first day. Being a dairy farmer’s daughter who went to Warrnambool High School, I’m still always a little amazed when people with titles like Professor and Head of the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London say “hi, I’m Kathy”, and are utterly smiley, nice, and not the least bit pretentious.

Here Kathy is (on the right) with the also-legendary and lovely Lyn Stone (on the left) and Sarah Awesome (AKA Asome) of Bentleigh West PS, (check out their NAPLAN Year 3 spelling gain here!) at the conference Sundowner drinks. However, in the interests of showing proper, gender-neutral academic respect I’ll use her surname from now on.

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