Each story in the Awakening Potential For Reading Success Book Series is aligned with a phonics concept or decoding strategy from the Awakening Potential For Reading Success reading program. (These books can also be used as stand alone phonics books with any other reading program, or just to give some extra practice with the particular phonics concepts). The stories will contain words which use the concepts, allowing the student to practice what they have learned from the corresponding lesson in the reading program.  The words which use the relevant concept will be highlighted.  Anytime the student encounters one of these words, he or she should apply the concept/strategy to decode (read) the word.  All of the other words in the story will either be sight words (words that can’t be decoded and need to be memorized, such as the, a, we, would, could, etc.) or words which use concepts/strategies that the student has already learned from previous lessons.

These books use the following concepts:

1. The Beginning Blenders (consonant beginning blends)

2. The Ending Blenders (consonant ending blends)

3. The Team Ups (sh, th, ch, ng)

4. The Copycats ( ff, ll, ss, ck, tch, dge)

5. The Silents (i.e. letter combinations where one letter is silent: wh, qu, wr, kn, ph)

6. The Cheerful Silent E (i.e. the e at the end of a word is silent. It is also very cheerful and ‘cheers on’ the the vowel to the left to make it’s long sound, by saying, “Come on vowel, you can do it! Say your long sound!”).

If you’ve learned these concepts from the Awakening Potential For Reading Success reading program, then you can definitely read these books! However, even without the program you can still read the words in these books by using the reference page in each book which describes the relevant concept.

Each story has three levels, according to the age and reading ability of the child (there is a description of the levels in each book). With 3 levels for each of the 6 stories, that’s a total of 18 books!

Level 1– Appropriate for students in grades 1-2.  Very short sentences, mostly containing sight words.  Only 1 or 2 words per sentence need to be decoded. Each page only has 1 sentence.  Text is quite large. Large pictures accompany the text on each page.

Level 2– Appropriate for students in grades 2-3.  Longer sentences with 2-3 words that need to be decoded.  Each page only has 1 sentence. Text is smaller than level 1. Large pictures accompany the text on each page.

Level 3– Appropriate for students in grades 3-4.  Longer sentences with more frequency of words that need to be decoded. Each sentence has 2-3 phrases.  Each page has multiple sentences.  Smaller pictures accompany the text on each page.

Level 4– Appropriate for students in grades 4-6.  Longest sentences of all the levels. Sentences have 2-3 phrases.  Each page only has a large number of sentences.  Pictures are only included every few pages.