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Let's take a moment to think about the value of take-home reading and ask ourselves some key questions, such as how has our approach to take-home reading evolved since changing our classroom instruction to follow the science of reading? How well does our take-home reading fit with our instructional approach?
In this blog we'll discuss why we need to stop sending home predictable books ... asap! And we'll propose five practical ways to improve our home reading approach and practice.
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Reasons we send books home include:
- Provide additional practice
- Build reading fluency
- Build confidence
- Build comprehension, especially vocabulary
- Increase exposure to different types of texts.
- Involve parents and carers in their child's education and academic success.
Can you think of any other reasons?
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We know it's hard - there are hundreds of predictable readers gathering dust in your classroom (if you haven't already thrown them away!) and you have a small, finite number of shiny new decodable books that you must use during the school day. You've got no/limited budget to buy enough copies of decodable books to send home, and what's the point anyway - they never come back, right?
Starting again with your early years reading books is tough on the budget and it will take time to build, but we must work towards it and in the meantime send home materials that support your approach in the classroom. Why do we feel so strongly about this?
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If you're explicitly teaching a structured literacy approach following a comprehensive and cumulative scope and sequence, send home predictable texts can cause issues undoing all of the great evidence-based work you're doing in your classroom.
- Students lose valuable time for reading practice aligned to classroom instruction jeopardising their potential progress in the classroom.
- Confusion for students! Children are taking home a book they do not have the knowledge to read yet. They will struggle. They will attempt to decode and fail, probably resorting to guesswork using the pictures. If you need a reminder of the differences between predictable and decodable texts and how they work scroll to the bottom of this blog.
- We can damage students' confidence and potentially turn students off reading because they struggle to read the texts being sent home.
- Impossible to build fluency - fluency is the product of reading accuracy (by decoding), automaticity and rate (achieved by repeated decoding) and prosody. Predictable texts will not provide opportunity to build foundations for fluent reading. You can read more about fluency here.
- Concern for parents - why is their child struggling to read the book? What is a level 5? Is that an expected level? - a question you can no longer answer as you'll be running evidence-informed assessments such as the LLARS or DIBELS which are not connected to levels in any way.
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- STOP sending home predictable books.
Just stop :) - Work towards sending home decodable books.
You could check our our Take-Home Bundle Special or look at purchasing apps at a lower cost. Work with leadership to prioritise resourcing reading next year. - Support and educate your parents and carers.
Ensuring parents are onboard with the approach and can support their child to decode can only help, You can access some presentation slides and other parent materials through links in this blog.
You can also refer parents to the Little Learners Love Literacy Parents and Carers page for a range of multimedia support. - Send home library books
The ideal take-home reading approach would include a combination of library books (above the student's reading level) for parents to read to their child and discuss, and decodable book/s for the child to read to their parent. Allowing children to build vocabulary, knowledge and love of books, whilst they are learning to master the foundations of word reading. Support for parents for library and decodable books can be found on our Parents and Carers page. - Get creative!
So you don't have enough decodable books yet - you can send home other valuable reading practice in a take-home kit every week. Check out this blog for ideas.
Remember our guiding principle at LLLL - no new learning at home, children should never be asked to read something that they haven't been taught yet or that is too difficult.
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What are decodable books?
Decodable books are written to support a synthetic phonics scope and sequence. Their role is to allow children to apply and master the knowledge that has been explicitly taught in the classroom. For example, the text examples below use just a handful of sounds and letters - see stage 2 and stage 3 of the Little Learners Love Literacy teaching sequence (https://www.littlelearnersloveliteracy.com.au/blogs/why-llll/the-seven-stages-of-llll).
To read a decodable book students need just one reading "strategy" - to sound out and blend to read the word. Children can apply their phonics knowledge to decode a range of words. This not only supports spelling, but it reduces the pressure on children's memory - they no longer have to remember the top 200 high frequency words and work out the rest for themselves - they have to remember 200 common graphemes and they're able to read 85% of all English words without any guesswork.
What are predictable books?
Predictable books are built to support a balanced literacy approach to teaching literacy. You can read more here (https://www.littlelearnersloveliteracy.com.au/blogs/why-llll/the-science-of-reading) if you're unclear why this approach is no longer widely supported. Students are asked to use a range of "strategies" to memorise and work out (guess) words to read. The text structure is predictable using the same sentence structure and high frequency words which children must memorise. Children are asked to look at the picture and the first sound in the word to work out the other words. Predictable book are often introduced to students with a 'walkthrough' whereby students have the book read to them first.
