On the one hand, there are books that beginners want to read but can't. Most picture books and chapter books fall into this category. Surprisingly, so do many of the early readers and I-can-reads you see in libraries and bookstores. On the other hand, too many of the decodable books that we see in classrooms aren't particularly enticing, even if beginners can read them. We think beginning readers deserve better.
Jump Rope Readers is a series of engaging and diverse decodable books that captivate beginning readers.
Each fiction book introduces new phonics features and high-frequency words to help students build skills. After kids have read several fiction books, they can read a matching set of nonfiction books that give them opportunities to practice the same words and letter-sound correspondences while learning about new content in a new genre.
Together, all of the Jump Rope Readers provide lots of supportive practice that allows students to gradually improve their skills as they step up towards the ultimate goal of reading confidently and fluently.
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Influential reading researchers Richard Anderson and Freddy Hiebert described the key qualities that educators should look for in books for beginning readers in a report they wrote for the National Academy of Education. They wrote:
"Writing the first selections a child will read is a difficult balancing act. Ideally, the selections will be:
- interesting (so that students will want to read them);
- comprehensible (so that students are able to understand them); and
- instructive (so that students will learn from them)."
Of course, a quality that underlies all of this is representation. When books are an accurate reflection of our beautifully diverse world, children find them considerably more interesting and comprehensible, so we added that foundational idea to the list of essential priorities that informed the development of the Jump Rope Readers series.
