This guide includes lessons that allow you to focus on the foundational skills that are so important to emergent readers as they connect sounds to letters, decode words, and develop a bank of sight words and academic vocabulary. In this guide, you will find tools to provide students with explicit and systematic phonemic awareness and phonics instruction. Each lesson links to an engaging studentbook that introduces phonics skills and provides a strong text-to-photo match in order to reinforce comprehension and build content-area knowledge.

This teacher resource book provides instructional strategies, activities, graphic organizers, and assessments to accompany the 26 Alphabet Connections in the Alphabet Connections series. Non-fiction writing, vocabulary development, and tips for differentiating instruction are also included.

An educational toolkit for teaching phonics, consisting of a book, posters and musical CD, all of which provides for multiple options and inputs for learning, including: visual-icons, auditory and kinesthetic motor skill manipulations, as well as a variety of dramatic and emotive cuing-systems designed to target the affective learning domain. This "backdoor-approach" to phonemic skill acquisition is based on current neural research on Learning & the Brain--specifically how our brains actually learn best!The Secret Stories® primary purpose is to equip beginning (or struggling, upper grade) readers and writers, as well as their instructors, with the tools necessary to easily and effectively crack the secret reading and writing codes that lie beyond the alphabet, and effectively out of reach for so many learners! It is not a phonics program! Rather, it simply provides the missing pieces learners need to solve the complex reading puzzle--one that some might never solve otherwise! The Secrets(tm) are sure to become one of the most valuable, well-used, and constantly relied-upon teaching tools in your instructional repertoire!