Introduction

If your child is learning to read with phonics at school, or you are teaching them at home using this method, it makes sense to use easy reader books which support phonics teaching.

These books help your child to practice specific phonics rules by containing words which can be sounded out using these rules.

If your child comes across a word they do not know they can decode it by breaking the word down into units (or phonemes) and blending together the sounds of each of these units.

While phonics-based easy reader books are perfect for practicing phonics rules, the vocabulary can sound strange at times when the author uses a word which follows a particular phonics rule, rather than choosing the most appropriate word.

There is also the risk that your child focuses so much on decoding the words that they start to lose the meaning of what they are reading.

If you find this is a problem, try reading authentic text easy reader books alongside phonics books. These are written without any specific phonics rules in mind and, through repeated readings, are a good way of building up your child's ability to recognize words by sight. They will eventually need to do this in order to read fluently.

Think of phonics-based easy reader books in two categories:

• The first category contains series of books which are designed to introduce the phonics sounds to your child in a gradual and systematic way.