Tas and Friends is a series of 100 readers for developing decoding skills. When children are learning the basic foundations of phonics, they need continual practice of these foundation elements. Readers provide a perfect opportunity to introduce the vowel, consonant, syllable, or blend to use and then practice.
These sets of Tas and Friends readers provide an ideal means for children to gain fluency and secondly, have fun reading for the first time. Phonics and decoding are the foundation skills for reading. Some children can indeed read without decoding but are they understanding the content? To speed up reading skills all children benefit by a starting program in decoding. This will introduce the student to vowels and consonants followed by a sequential building of use of blends and syllables.
Children build confidence and fluency and are ready to decode unknown words. Readers speed up the literacy program in schools.
A general outline of what is covered in the series is as follows;
Consonant - all letters except the vowels b,c,d,f,g,h,j,k,l,m,n,p,q,r,s,t,v,w,x,y,z. Plus consonant blends ck, th, etc
Vowel - a,e,i,o,u.
Sight words - words that the children have to memorise. The word could be: a/ not decodable or b/ the word is too difficult to decode at the present level of learning. Sight words used in these readers cover the first 80 words of the Dolch list of commonly used words. Words such as the, and, see, come, what, are, make, down, help, etc.
Set 1 covers CSVC - consonant, short vowel, consonant combinations eg. Tas, cat, mat, rat etc.
Set 2 covers CCSVC - consonant, consonant, short vowel, consonant combinations eg.trip,bird,long.
Set 3 covers CLVC - consonant, long vowel, consonant combinations eg.gate,and sight words - by, does.
Set 4 covers CVVC - consonant, vowel, vowel, consonant combinations eg.long vowel digraph - 'ai' such as; main, grain. sight words - could, food.
Set 5 covers Sets 1-4 skills - revision and mastery set of 20 readers. The main difference is the amount of words is doubled per page as the children should be a lot more fluent after reading Sets 1-4.
Each teacher has a sequence to follow of introduction and practice of specific vowels and consonant combinations. The author in this series has used his proven sequence to introduce the vowels and consonant combinations. This is set out in the sequence list attached to this page. The author's sequence goes from the easy to hard and is essential for children to gain decoding skills in the shortest time frame.