Category Archives: Learning to Read

Announcing the release of two new Duck and Friends books, now in color! Check out Duck and Friends: Bots in a Box and Duck and Friends Go Into Orbit! Available on Amazon and other online retailers in paperback and kindle. Enjoy!

As children who have been introduced to reading through board books and pictures books (How Children Learn to Read Part 1: SIT) get older, they reach a point where they want to do it themselves. I call this stage STAND. And as delightful as picture books are, many are too difficult to be read by children who are just learning…

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Once you understand how the Lexile system works (Writing Early Readers, Part 1: Understanding Lexile Levels), the next step is to use the Lexile system to write at the desired level. This matters most when you are writing books to be read by young readers. Suppose you want to write an early reader for grades K-2. Here’s how I did…

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The genre of early readers can be fun and delightful (Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham) or dull as dry toast (Dick and Jane). Maybe the only element these books have in common is the ease with which they can be read. If you want to write early readers (generally grades K-2), it is necessary to understand concepts that factor…

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As different as children are, they still go through the same basic steps to learn their first skills.  Think of a child who learns to walk.  First, they have to learn to sit.  No one jumps out of their bassinet and walks without first learning how to sit.  Then they become mobile, in whatever form that takes. The next step…

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When children begin to learn to read, they leave the realm of beautifully rich picture books and move on to books with short, easy words. Too many of these books are BORING. The Bob Books were assigned reading in kindergarten. They are set up neatly with easy to sound out three-letter-words, but in our house we found they were not…

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