You might spot a couple of longer words in these books, but don’t worry! We’ve handpicked them so that new readers can easily figure out how to pronounce them all on their own.

Back when I was in primary school, I took pure joy in mastering the longest Welsh word (Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch), and like every other kid who watched Mary Poppins, I had “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” memorized. Honestly, I still have no clue what it means, but those lengthy words are like a magical spell that can leave even the wisest parents scratching their heads.

Our author, Dr. J. Ford, faced quite the challenge writing these five tales because words like “the” were off-limits. Surprisingly, even though “the” seems simple, it can be a tongue-twister when you’re just starting to master English.

Our goal? To make sure every eager young reader can pick up any of our five books and breeze through them without any grown-up assistance. That’s the key to sparking curiosity and giving young minds that fantastic sense of accomplishment. After reading one book independently, these budding bookworms will be hungry for more.

While many popular books for early readers toss in lots of tough words, we decided to go in the opposite direction by using only the easiest words to create a laid-back and enjoyable reading experience.

Phonic Awareness

The term “phonic awareness” typically refers to the development of phonemic awareness skills in children, which are crucial for early reading and literacy.

Phonemic awareness is the ability to recognize, manipulate, and work with individual phonemes (the smallest units of sound in language) in spoken words. While there isn’t a universally standardized framework of phonic awareness levels,  here is our simplified breakdown of the seven different stages, or levels, of phonemic awareness development:

1. Awareness of Environmental Sounds: At this early stage, children become aware of various sounds in their environment, such as the sound of a car, a dog barking, or a doorbell ringing. While not directly related to phonemic awareness, this awareness of sounds is a precursor to more specific phonemic skills.
2. Listening for Rhymes: Children start to recognize words that rhyme, such as “cat” and “hat.” They can identify and produce simple word endings that sound the same.
3. Syllable Awareness: Children learn to identify and count the number of syllables in words. For example, they recognize that “cat” has one syllable, while “banana” has three.
4. Onset and Rime Awareness: In this stage, children can separate the beginning consonant sound (onset) from the rest of the word (rime). For example, they can recognize that “cat” is made up of the onset “c” and the rime “at.”
5. Phoneme Isolation: At this level, children can isolate individual phonemes within words. For example, they can identify the first sound in “dog” as /d/.
6. Phoneme Blending: Children learn to blend individual phonemes together to form words. They can, for example, blend /c/, /a/, and /t/ to say the word “cat.”
7. Phoneme Segmentation: This is the most advanced level of phonemic awareness. Children can break words down into their individual phonemes. For example, they can segment the word “dog” into /d/, /o/, and /g/.

“These levels of phonemic awareness typically develop sequentially in young children as they progress toward becoming proficient readers. Developing strong phonemic awareness skills is a critical foundation for learning to read and spell words in an alphabetic writing system like English.”