Highly Decodable Books that Tell Compelling stories

Sports Tales: The Magic Hat

PJ loves to play 1-on-1 basketball with his best friend Max.

However, they both want to win so badly that they get mad at each other and no longer wish to be friends! With their team set to play in a big game, can PJ and Max become friends gain or will their rivalry cost their team the season?

Sports Tales: No One Likes to Lose

The Carolina Catfish are Parker's favorite baseball team.

He watches every game, and he even has a one-of-a-kind poster of their star player, Rocky Ramirez.

When the poster tears, Parker hopes to find a way to fix it. But in his quest, he instead finds a magic hat that makes his biggest dreams come true.

Learn More: What Does Decodable mean?

A "decodable" word is one that a reader can "sound out" by following typical phonics rules. These are in contrast to "irregular words" which may have one or more components that do not follow the most common phonics rules. To illustrate, look at the sentence below. The decodable words will be highlighted yellow.

The red fox was very hungry.

In the sentence above, only red and fox follow typical phonics rules. The remaining words all have one or more tricky components that go away from conventional phonics.

It is important that readers learn to read this tricky words, but for someone who is newer to reading, seeing too many of these tricky words in a book can create frustration, confusion, and a barrier to enjoying reading.

However, due to words like "the", "is", "she", and many other common words being hard to sound out, it is not possible to tell a compelling story while also ensuring the text is fully decodable.

I try to find a happy medium between the two as I create books under the Literacy Lamp brand. Ultimately, it is my hope that the books I create will cultivate a confidence and a joy in the readers who read them.

- Jordan