basal readers

For Grade levels K to around 1.8, I have had very good success with the Ladybird *Key Word* series (a and b books only) books 1a and 1b through 6a and 6b, plus workbooks. This series has recently been re-issued by Penguin UK and is readily available on the internet.

I recommend these books highly because they have very strictly controlled vocabulary and a huge amount of repetition *but* with real English structures, real sentences of increasing length, and many running words pe page as the levels advance.

For higher levels I use a variety of old basals; I find that once the foundations of phonics and a solid vocabulary are down, you can read anything with a reasonable vocabulary so I just look for content.

Katherine:

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You may want to consider SRA’s Reading Mastery series. Reading Mastery is part of their Direct Instruction series. It is scripted. But it’s good for developing vocabulary and basic comprehension skills such as recall, inference and finding the main idea. Most lessons have two passages: a short passage about a Social Studies or Science concept, and a longer passage which is usually a section of a story that usually extends from five to ten lessons. The stories are very enjoyable. Even though I had to adjust the script of the 4th grade reader for my 7th graders a few years ago, they really enjoyed the stories. There’s a fluency check at the end of each lesson, and a timed-reading after every five lessons. There are two workbooks—one which is related to the story just read, and the other that builds cumulative knowledge about all the facts and stories presented thus far. The stories become quite sophisticated at the upper elementary level.

Good luck.

Marilyn

I have used the Ladybird books, they are well written as Victoria mentioned, but the stories are very young in content and dull. If the child is older, especially if he is a boy, you may have trouble getting him to read them. I couldn’t get my son to read them, he hated the stories.

Were you using the Key Words, or other books? Ladybird has put out a lot of commercial stuff too. What level were you using? I only use levels 1 to 6 normally (7 to 10 for emergency upgrading) and as I mentioned, these are grade levels K to 1.8, vocabulary 17 words to 200 or so — let’s face it, anything on that low a level is not going to be great literature. I promise students that once they are really reading, then we’ll get out of the highly-structured series and choose stories that they like — but for those first 200 words, some heavy repitition is needed. One of the things I like about this series is that the repetition is already in the book, so you don’t need to read the same page over and over; the stories may not be too suspenseful but at least you get to move ahead and finish them.

My third grade son is in a series published by (Burnett or Burdette) Ginn. They seem to be a controlled series to me. Very short stories with lots of repeating of the same words. They appear to have several stories at each level. Last night he did a level 5 book but I think it was story 15 or so at that level. On the back inside cover of the book they have a list of the new words that were introduced in the story. He has enjoyed most of these simple stories.

Have you looked at the books online at readinga-z? these books are leveled readers. It costs $29.99 to join for 1 year for unlimited downloads. My kids love these books. There is a lot of nonfiction and the stories are interesting. They go from preprimer to about 4th grade level. Plus there are read aloud books, decodable books and phonics readers. The url is:
www.readinga-z.com