Practice the sound and symbol relationships introduced in the Reading A-Z phonics lessons with books featuring simple pictures with labels. Sound/Symbol Books can also be used as stand-alone reinforcements of important letter-sound correspondence that lead to successful decoding.
Why Use Sound/Symbol Books
Recognizing letters or combinations of letters and the sounds they make is an early indicator of later reading success. Sound/Symbol Books show the uppercase and lowercase graphemes of the target letter in a label for a simple illustration. Later pages show simple sentences to also expose students to high-frequency words, basic sentence structures, and concepts of print.
Letter, word, and picture shown all in one place helps build automaticity for not only letter and sound recognition, but also word recognition.
In Sound/Symbol Books, the target letter-sound combination might be shown in the initial, medial, or final position of words as appropriate, and sometimes in more than one position for a particular letter-sound relationship.
How to Use Sound/Symbol Books
Sound/Symbol Books can be used as a bridge between letter recognition and decoding. After introducing students to a letter using Reading A-Z's Alphabet Books, you can use Sound/Symbol Books, Decodable Books, and Read-Aloud Books in combination to make vital connections between letters and sounds to support key early reading skills.
Students can use the last page in Sound/Symbol Books to draw an object and then label the object by using a word containing the featured sound/symbol relationship.