In Step 4 of each Road to Reading lesson, students read a decodable book that, ideally, closely matches the decoding skill they have been learning. For example, if your student has been learning the short /o/ sound (as in octopus), then you want to use a book in Step 4 that has a lot of short /o/ words (e.g., "A Lot of Dogs" from the Scholastic ReadingLine series).
Like many aspects of teaching, accumulating an excellent variety of decodable texts to match lessons takes time and some hunting around. I order sets of decodable texts from Scholastic book orders, from Amazon.com, and I scour the book racks at Salvation Army stores and book sales for phonics-based texts. If another teacher has a series of decodable books that look good, I'll Google the publisher and try to order them online.
Here are some of my favorite publishers/series thus far:
- Steck Vaughn Phonics Readers
- BOB Books
- Scholastic ReadingLine
- Scholastic At-Home Phonics Reading Program
- Now I'm Reading! (InnovativeKids)
- I Can Read! Phonics (Harper Collins)
- Primary Phonics
- Dr. Maggie's Phonics Readers
If you are working in a school, many basal reading programs come with decodable texts that can also work nicely in Step 4 of Road to Reading. The important thing here is to try to find a book that mostly includes words with phonic patterns you have already taught your students so that they can practice these skills and build success.
As you accumulate a larger collection of decodable texts, you may want to organize them by the predominant phonic element (i.e., file short /a/ books together, short /i/ books together, etc.). Yes, this does mean breaking up the neat little boxed sets of BOB books, but my colleagues and I have found that creating a filing system by phonic focus makes for more efficient materials access. Here is a photo of my decodable texts file box with each hanging folder corresponding to a specific sound focus:
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| Each hanging file folder contains decodable books that focus on a particular sound pattern (e.g., short /a/ books). |
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| The contents of my short /a/ folder including decodable texts from a variety of series. |
