Stories with a Focus on Phonics - New Titles from Author & LESLLA Educator Shelley Hale Lee
Stories to Teach Phonics to Adult Emergent Readers
Some of you may be familiar with Shelley Hale Lee’s work. She landed on the scene as the author of At the River and Other Stories for Adult Emergent Readers. As described on her website, At the River and Other Stories gives students the opportunity to acquire basic literacy skills in English. Phonics exercises provide direct instruction in letter sounds, letter formation and blending. Each of the ten units offers one or more decodable stories so that students can put their decoding abilities to work right away in a meaningful context. The stories about Pam, Bob and their family relate directly to students' lives. Story themes include: family, the household, transportation, clothing, shopping, leisure activities, health, work, and daily routines.
Well, Shelley has done it again with the publication of two new readers: In Town and At the Lake.
In Town
In Town helps English language learners practice reading in several ways. The stories help reading fluency. Sentences include useful vocabulary and many common words in English. Some stories have conversations that model spoken English. In Town features short and long vowel sounds and common sight words.
Meet the Mendez family: Vera, Ricardo, David, and Carmen. The kids need new jackets, so they go shopping. At the store, Carmen meets a good friend. The Mendez family enjoys lunch at Kate's Diner. Then, Ricardo starts to think about a new job as a food truck server. Will he take the new job?
Meet the Yousef family: Dina, Abdul, Zara, Hassan, and Fariba. Fariba is happy to meet her friend Carmen at the store. On the way home, Dina needs to get medicine at the pharmacy for Hassan. Hassan is sick, and he has a big soccer game in two days. Will he get better in time for the game?
At the Lake
At the Lake includes short stories and multiple exercises that offer scaffolded practice in the most commonly used sound-spelling patterns of long vowels in English. R-controlled vowels and other vowel variations are also taught directly. Students review short vowels, consonant blends, and consonant digraphs in each unit. At the Lake helps students build reading fluency and decoding skills, which foster vocabulary acquisition and comprehension skills.
Review of At the Lake
Kim Wyatt, who coordinates 20-30 volunteer teachers through USCRI and organizes small groups of refugee-background learners has used At the River and now At the Lake. This is what Kim had to say about At the Lake.
I am so happy to have At The Lake available to assist my adult students, who are learning to read for the first time in any language. The intention in the content being taught and the way each unit builds on the previous unit is fantastic. I have used these materials in the classroom and now I am using them as I teach ESL virtually. The students LOVE having their own book. It is great for homework too. In the virtual setting, I am able to have the students send me an audio of them reading a story or making sentences using focal words. The teacher materials and the scope and sequence, which includes topics to discuss along with each unit , is extremely helpful.
Review of In Town
Gwen Bowles, one of Kim's teachers is now using In Town. This is what she had to say about how she and her class interacted with the story in Chapter 1.
I just started using In Town and really like it! First, I really like that it looks like a chapter book. I have only taught the first chapter so far. My students are very quick learners- they went from knowing 5 English words this time last year to completing both of [the] other books plus some supplemental materials I had.
They were already familiar with the vocabulary used in chapter 1. The first day, I read the introduction to them and then they took turns reading aloud paragraph by paragraph - discussing it along the way. The only vocabulary that needed further explanation was "cool." We used the first paragraph to teach about finding the main idea and details using a graphic. The second session we switched paragraphs and read aloud again. I introduced the parts of a story - characters, setting, problem, solution. This was the first time using those terms and took some time before they understood. We also looked for possessives, contractions and hard c words in the story.
Plans for the second session include one more reading of chapter 1 to work on fluency. Then moving to chapter 2. I will follow a similar pattern as chapter 1 with the addition of teaching percentages with a calculator.
Next in the Series
Shelley isn’t stopping here! If these readers do well, she and her publisher have a plan for the next readers: At Work and At School, which will include kids in school, a high school senior, an adult ESL class, and a continuing education adult student. In Town has a Syrian family and a Latinx family. The next books will introduce a Korean family and a family from either Eritrea or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
About Shelley
Shelley has been teaching for more than 20 years. Her ESL experience includes public K-12 schools and colleges in Budapest, Southern California, and North Carolina. From 2013-2017, she was a teacher trainer at the local and state levels specializing in literacy approaches for adult ESL emergent readers. She is a past presenter at professional gatherings such as LESLLA, the NCSU ESL Symposium, and the NC Literacy Council. She is a frequent presenter at the annual TESOL Convention. Shelley currently teaches ESL at William G. Enloe Magnet High School in Raleigh, N.C.
For more information and resources, visit Shelley's website, www.emergentreaders.org, or her author page with Wayzgoose Press. On Amazon, you can see some sample pages. In Town has an e-book option with color illustrations.