Learning to Read

Just like anything else, learning to read is all about practice.

Children become better readers by spending more time reading.

Things get complicated when we have a child who is struggling to read or struggling to find things they want to read.

When books are uninteresting or too challenging, children won’t want to read them, and a child who doesn’t want to read will not improve their reading ability.

What makes a Successful Reader?

Successful readers are children who read, and keep reading. Reading more makes you a better reader. Successful readers have access to reading materials that meet them where they are. Billy Books provide opportunities for children to practice skills and strategies they are learning with books that pique their interest.

Successful Readers are Also:

Engaged readers. They’re having fun and they’re enjoying the story enough that they want to keep reading. Engaged readers are more likely to stick with a book when it becomes challenging.

Motivated readers. Ideally a child is challenged just enough by their reading material to boost their confidence, but not so much that they become frustrated.

Successfully overcoming a challenge creates a positive feedback loop for students, making them more likely to want to read and to enjoy reading.

HOW DO CHILDREN LEARN TO READ?

There are Five Stages of Reading Development, but here we’re going to focus on the first two:

EMERGENT READING (Ages 0-5)

Children learn how to hold books and turn pages, and develop an awareness of printed text. All these scribbly shapes on signs, books, and screens mean something!
As children learn to talk they expand their vocabulary, and learn storytelling, grammar, and sentence structure.
They recognize spoken words are made up of individual sounds, and learn to identify rhyming words. These spoken sounds correspond to letters, and each letter has its own name.
Scribbling progresses into intentional shape formation, to drawing, and eventually into attempting to form letters and words.

EARLY READING (Ages 5-7)

During this stage of reading development children are more engaged with text and making meaning.
As their phonetic skills increase, they are able to draw the correlation between letters and sounds, allowing them to decode words by blending sounds together.
Words that appear often in books are called high frequency words. Some of these words follow the phonetic structure (decodable words) and some are particularly irregular because parts of the word don’t follow the typical sound to symbol correspondence. Children must learn both types of words and have the ability to recognize them quickly. This improves reading fluency.
As they become more fluent readers, they are able to spend more energy thinking about what they are reading and answer questions about what is happening in the story.
Their vocabularies increase both through exposure to new words in their reading material, and through the instruction of vocabulary words.
Children use their phonics skills to help them stretch out sounds in words to write simple sentences.

Early Reading Material in the Classroom

Decodable Readers

Decodable stories are books where the text is limited to the phonics skills a child has already acquired. Children can decode most of the words in these books using the letter-sound knowledge they have been taught until that point. Reading with Billy Books provides decodable readers that both follow specific phonics patterns and get children excited to read.

Leveled Readers

Leveled Readers are written with a balance of decodable and non-decodable words, including content-specific words. Non-decodable words don’t follow all phonics patterns or are patterns not yet learned by the child. Content-specific words are often not decodable but make the book more interesting. Think, “Come here and look at the basketball. I can dribble it.” Words like come and here are non-decodable words for beginning readers. Words like and or at are decodable. Words like basketball and dribble are non-decodable words that are content-specific. Reading with Billy Books masterfully combine all three types of words to keep your reader engaged and challenged.

Where do Reading with Billy Books fit in?

Reading with Billy Books offer a mix of both decodable texts and leveled readers.

Where RWBB differ from other early reading material is content.

Reading with Billy Books provides access to high-interest content like superheroes, sports, graphic novels, and animals, subjects kids are interested in, written at their reading level.

Like other Early Readers, Reading with Billy Books become increasingly challenging. However, the progression of difficulty is slower than typical beginning reader books, so students experience continued success with every RWBB book they read.