How to Choose a Decodable Book That Actually Fits

A decodable book is not a type of book you can buy. It is a book whose words happen to fit the sounds one particular child has already been taught. That is why the same book can be perfect for one Year 1 child and useless for the one sitting next to them. Choosing well therefore starts with your child rather than the shelf, and it takes about four minutes once you know what to look at. Here is the order to do it in.

Step 1. Start with what your child has been taught

Before you look at a single book, find out where your child actually is. The reading record, the school's website or a one line email to the class teacher will normally do it, and the question to ask is precise: which sounds has my child been taught so far.

That is a different question from which book band they are on. A band tells you what the school is giving them. The sound list tells you what they can decode, and it is the sound list that makes a book work or not work.

If nobody has told you, the book in the bag usually gives it away. The labels on the cover identify the programme, and once you know the programme, the published progression tells you the rest.

Step 2. Translate the label on the cover

Every programme labels its books differently, and the labels look far more mysterious than they are.

You are not trying to become an expert in all of them. You only need to recognise your own school's system well enough to buy or borrow something that lands in the same place.

Step 3. Open the book and read the words, not the blurb

Publishers' claims about decodability are not the check. The check is you, reading a page, asking whether every word on it uses a sound your child has met.

Take a Phase 4 child as the example. Phase 4 introduces no new sounds at all. The work is words with two consonants together, such as stamp, crust, blend and gift. So a Phase 4 book should be full of exactly those, and should not contain a-e or ou spellings that do not arrive until Phase 5.

One split digraph on page three is enough to turn a book from practice into a battle, because the child has no way of working it out and learns only that reading is a guessing game.

You do not need to scan the whole book. Read two pages from the middle, where publishers are least careful, and one from near the end. If those are clean, the rest almost always is. If they are not, put it back, because the problem will be worse in the second half than the first.

The same check works in reverse when a book is too easy. A Phase 4 child reading a book of three letter words is not doing anything wrong, but they are not being stretched either, and a whole term of that gets dull.

Step 4. Check the tricky words too

Sounds are only half the fit. Every programme also teaches a set of words that cannot be sounded out with what has been taught so far, and books are written around a specific list of them.

In the Letters and Sounds framework, the Phase 4 list runs: said, so, have, like, some, come, were, there, little, one, do, when, out and what. A book aimed at that point can use them freely. A book that also throws in people or should, which come later, is quietly harder than it looks.

Different programmes use different names for these. Read Write Inc calls them red words and tells children to stop and think rather than sound them out. Essential Letters and Sounds calls them harder to read and spell words. The principle is identical: you tell your child the word and move on.

Step 5. Apply the one word in ten test

If you cannot check the word list, check the child. Have them read a page aloud while you count.

If they stop on more than about one word in ten, it is the wrong book for practice. It may still be a lovely book for you to read to them.

Roughly one stop in twenty is the sweet spot for building fluency: enough to be real reading, not so much that the story falls apart. Below that, the book is a confidence read, which has its own value. Above about one in ten, you are watching your child work rather than read, and that is where reading at home starts to feel like a chore.

Step 6. Look at how much is on the page

Two books can contain identical sounds and feel completely different. What separates them is load: how many words are on each page, how long the sentences run, and whether the text sits in one clean block or wraps awkwardly round an illustration.

For a child in the first year of reading, fewer words per page is nearly always better. A page with one line on it gets finished, and a finished page is what makes a child turn to the next one.

Check the pictures too. The best early books have illustrations that make the story enjoyable without handing over the answer. Guessing from pictures is precisely the habit that decodable books exist to prevent, so a book whose picture shows the noun in the sentence is working against itself.

Step 7. Be careful with books that only look decodable

Several things on the shelf resemble phonics books and are not. Levelled readers from older schemes, first readers built around repeated sentence patterns, and anything whose selling point is a familiar character are all fine as stories and unreliable as practice.

Repetition is the giveaway. If a book relies on the same sentence with one word swapped on every page, a child can complete it without decoding anything after page two. That is a book about memory, not about reading.

If your school still uses the older Letters and Sounds framework, it is worth knowing that it was removed from the government's validated list in May 2021, with schools given until the spring of 2022 to move. The stated reason was that the 2007 handbook "isn't a full Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) programme because it doesn't provide the support, guidance, resources or training needed." The phases themselves were not the problem, which is why the phase numbers remain the common skeleton underneath most current programmes.

Step 8. Know where to get them

Start with the school. Many schools will send home an extra book on request, and a few run a lending library of decodables that parents never think to ask about. Ask whether your child has online access to the programme's own books, because several publishers provide exactly that and schools do not always mention it.

Public libraries carry more phonics books than they did five years ago, though they are rarely shelved together, so it is worth asking rather than browsing. Buying is the last resort rather than the first, and if you do buy, buy within the programme your school uses.

Step 9. Use the book properly once you have it

The fit is only half the job. The other half is how the read goes, and a well chosen book can still be spoiled by twenty minutes of correction at the end of a long day.

1. Wait five seconds before helping. Most children who get there get there at around four.
2. When they are stuck, give the sounds rather than the word. Saying s-t-o-p hands them the win; saying stop takes it away.
3. Tricky words get told, not sounded out.
4. Keep it to five or ten minutes and stop while they still want more.
5. Let them reread anything they liked. Rereading is how words stop needing to be worked out.

Where to go next

If the word decodable itself is still doing a lot of unexplained work, it is worth ten minutes on what it actually means, because most of the confusion in this area comes from treating it as a category of book rather than a relationship between a book and a reader.

Lindo Phonics is not connected to Letters and Sounds and is not endorsed by them. We match the published progression so a story only uses sounds your child has already been taught.