How to choose a decodable text

Overview

Literacy specialists Elaine Stanley and Rebecca McEwan present this overview of how to choose a decodable text.

View the transcript. | View the slide outlines.

Resources mentioned in this video

Phonics professional learning: Choosing and using decodable texts [0:25]

Literacy Hub phonics progression [2:48]

Word and code complexity continuum [3:25]

SPELD NSW decodable book selectors [8:03]

Free decodable texts [8:48]

Who is this video for? 

Foundation to Year 2 teachers; school leaders 

What will you learn? 

How to choose decodable texts that match your students’ skills and knowledge, so they can practise decoding which leads to orthographic mapping of words to long-term memory.

Presenters 

Elaine Stanley and Rebecca McEwan are experienced teachers, school leaders and literacy coaches. They have had extensive experience implementing systematic synthetic phonics in primary school classrooms, and have recently coached disadvantaged school around Australia.  

Related content 

Phonics instructional model for reading and spelling

This phonics instructional model for reading and spelling outlines the attributes of instruction, a lesson and review model, a sample phonics lesson and examples of skill application tasks.

Using decodable texts in the classroom

This infographic guides teachers on using decodable texts with students. 

Phonics professional learning: Choosing and using decodable texts

The Literacy Hub provides free, online professional learning to support schools through each step of building a systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) approach for reading and spelling. This third topic in the series unpacks decodable texts.