Description
The book series ‘Essential Steps to Literacy’ offers a systematic, synthetic phonics programme over 8 books covering roughly three years. The books are designed according to the latest pedagogical research, to help learners to both read and write simultaneously in English. Competency builds easily as learning is incremental with earlier concepts constantly being reviewed. Graphemes are introduced in order of frequency of use, enabling children to read and write from the first day using the most commonly used words. The scope and sequence at the beginning of each book indicates the clear progressive steps.
The books are written with ESL children in mind and have references to those whose first language is Arabic, but are ideal for any KG or Grade 1 beginners, older children who are late starters to English literacy learning or for intervention. Books 1-3 cover around 55 graphemes, facilitating the reading and writing of over 800 words.
Book 2 builds upon the foundational sounds of single letters and introduces a further 12 graphemes (digraphs and the trigraph -tch). It offers words and sentences for reading and writing practice, plus 25 short stories which may be printed out as decodable books.
Writing pages are included so that children can immediately write what they have read; the physical process of writing helps to facilitate memory retention as students review the sound to symbol correspondences in their heads and also invokes muscle memory as they write the words. Teachers are encouraged to ensure word comprehension, thus completing the process of embedding word spelling which is termed ‘orthographic mapping’.
A review section is also provided with each lesson to keep track of learning to date.
Teacher notes are provided for every lesson with additional interesting snippets of information and advice on best practice. The books are attractive to children, being in full colour, with engaging texts and easy to follow instructions. An appendix offers extra words for practice and there is also a Certificate of Completion at the end of each book.
It is important to start on Book 1 as each book builds upon the learning in the previous one.
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