My Decodable Books

I have been teaching my young children to read-- see this LessWrong post I wrote for more details.

As part of this, I started writing "sentences" for my child to read as he gained just enough reading fluency to read simple sentences. These seemed to go over much better than commercial decodable books, for a few reasons:

• I can customize them to his interests. He likes animals most.
• I can include just a FEW non-decodable words to make things more fun, like "lion" or "Pikachu."
• Shorter sentences; more customization to his ability level as well as interests.

Nonetheless, the state of the art in decodable books is simply so bad -- there are very few of them, and the ones there are aren't very good -- that I think others might benefit from using ours as well. So here you go!

Notes on using these:
• Reading Bear section: I taught my child phonics using the word list from Reading Bear. So the decodable books go by the Reading Bear order: for example, if it says "Reading Bear section: 'or'," it's written to be decodable using (almost) entirely words from the "or" Reading Bear section and previous sections. We did just a couple things out of order from Reading Bear-- taught the word "the" to make reading easier shortly before the "th" section in Reading Bear, and also taught words ending in -y ("happy", "rocky") fairly early, so those words may be in earlier books as well.
• Formatting: Each one is a PDF in landscape orientation that you can print. I bind them by laminating them, using a hole punch, then using key rings to keep them together, for a fairly toddler-proof arrangement; with kids who can be trusted with paper, you could just print them and staple the edges to "bind."

Name	# pages	Reading Bear section	Exceptions	Notes
Lion and Pikachu	7	"long e" OR as early as "wh, qu, th" if you help with the word "me"	"Lion" and "Pikachu."
The Excellent Machine	17	"or"	"Machine", "of," plus "Laura" and "Uncle" and "Grandpa." I intend to teach "Excellent" as "x and c make an x sound together."	Summary of the chapter "The Wonderful Machine" from Little House in the Big Woods. "Thresh" is technically decodable but also challenging.
Lion's Gift	7	"initial blends"	"Lion", "happy"	About a fox and a lion.
The Planets	9	"long e" ("near"), otherwise "digraphs and x"	All the planet names; "side"	One decodable fact per planet (8 of them). Alphablocks "magic e" helped us get through "side" even though it's not in our Anki yet.