Henry and Mudge

And about then, they know a lot of the phonics that will help them with a book like Frog and Toad or Little Bear or Messy Bessy.

So we will continue to choose a decodable text to teach them the I sound and or maybe next week the er sound, but we're also going to be reading a text like Henry and Mudge.

Your first and relentless priority is developing that sound-based decoding approach that the child has an attack approach to an unfamiliar word, not to look at the picture, not to make a guess based on the first letter, but to look at every sound, every symbol, read them left or right, And if that's their first approach, then the next thing they need to do is to have those words that they've decoded become automatically recognized or become so-called sight words.

They need to be orthographically mapped.

These words that they're not automatic with yet to become automatic because it's constrained to how many words are in a text and many of them are repeated and they have a lot of high frequency words.

What is important to know is that the top 300 words represent about 65% of written English.

So let's teach our kids to decode those words and see them enough so that they can quickly get into Henry and Mudge.

And then they reread Henry and Mudge and those words become solid.