Age 5-7 Reading
Overview
At Beyond the Page, we take pride in our literature-based curriculum and the unique approach to learning that real books can provide. In order to take full advantage of our literature-based curriculum in later years, it is essential that children build strong reading and comprehension skills when they are young. This is our goal for the Beyond the Page Reading program — to develop strong, confident readers.
To help your child become a strong reader, we focus on three main areas.
- Phonemic Awareness — the understanding that words are made of small units of sound,
- Phonics — the systematic study learning of letters and the sounds they represent, and
- Fluency — reading with speed, accuracy, and precision.
You can read about each of these areas in more detail on our reading overview page.
Requirements
Before beginning this level, your child should be able to:
- Recognize upper and lower case letters
- Write upper and lower case letters
- Identify the sounds of the letters
Reading Placement Questionnaire
* If your child has not mastered these skills you may consider starting with our Age 4-5 level where these skills are taught.
What Is Included
The following items are included in the Age 5-7 Full Year Reading Package.
2 Parent Manuals
The Parent Manuals include step-by-step instructions for completing each daily lesson. They outline your week and walk you through each activity. Begin with Lesson 1 and complete each lesson in order.
There is one parent manual for each semester.
2 Student Activity Books
Learning to read involves developing many new skills and gaining new knowledge. Both of these take practice, and our student activity pages help to provide that practice in an attractive and engaging way. Your child will work on word families, write letters and words, sort items by vowel sounds, practice sight words, rhyme with similar sounding words, and much more...
There is one student activity book for each semester.
31 Weekly Readers
The whole purpose of learning to read is to be able to pick up a book and unlock its message. This is why we include weekly readers with colorful illustrations and engaging text. When students are beginning to learn to read, having pictures with context clues can be really helpful as they sound out each new word. Once students have worked through a book a few times, new words become more ingrained and fluency increases.
The books increase in complexity as new material is introduced. Students will be exposed to new words, sight words, questions, exclamations, quotes, and more — all while reading fun and engaging stories with relatable characters.
34 Weekly Messages
Every week your child will receive a Weekly Message that you will read together. These messages serve multiple purposes:
- They model how we read from left to right and top to bottom,
- they expose your child to high frequency words that will become part of his sight word collection, and
- they introduce new vocabulary.
Each week you will start off with a weekly message, and your child will use these message to complete activities that teach and reinforce new reading skills and content.
114 Sight Word Cards
Developing sight words is an essential skill to build reading fluency. In order to read with speed and accuracy, students must move beyond decoding and recognize whole words as soon as they see them. These sight word cards are one tool that your student will use to build a foundation of sight words.
Students start with just a few sight words at the beginning of the year and slowly but consistently build their library of sight words as the year progresses.
Uppercase and Lowercase Letter Cards
Letter cards are used for a variety of activities such as learning sounds, practicing blends, and building words.
Word Building Cards
This card set includes 112 letter combinations that will be used throughout the year. These cards help to reinforce word families, introduce digraphs (two letters that have a single sound like /sh/), teach blending and segmenting, and facilitate word building.
As with the sight word words, students start with just a few at the beginning of the year and build their usage up over time.
Making Sentences Cards
This deck of cards includes 117 word cards split between five different sets. They are used periodically throughout the year as students practice building and completing sentences with these words.
Handwriting Paper, Laminated Writing Sheet, Markers, and Highlighters
Beyond the Page Reading also comes with materials students will use to practice writing. These include 80 legal-size handwriting pages, one laminated handwriting sheet, two dry-erase markers, and three highlighters.
Table of Contents
Semester 1
- Lesson 1: Letter Sounds Review I
- Lesson 2: Letter Sounds Review II
- Lesson 3: Letter Sounds Review III
- Lesson 4: Letter Sounds Review IV
- Lesson 5: Adding s, More Word Families, Ending with ck
- Lesson 6: Open Syllables and Digraph th
- Lesson 7: Consonant Digraphs ch, sh, wh, ph
- Lesson 8: Blends with s
- Lesson 9: Blends with l
- Lesson 10: Blends with r
- Lesson 11: Ending Blends
- Lesson 12: Double ll, ss, ff, zz (FLOSS)
- Lesson 13: Glued Sounds ng and nk
- Lesson 14: Three-Letter Beginning Blends
- Lesson 15: More Ending Blends
- Lesson 16: R-Controlled Vowels (ar)
- Lesson 17: Semester Review
Semester 2
- Lesson 1: Long Vowels a and i with Silent e
- Lesson 2: Long Vowels o, u, and e with Silent e
- Lesson 3: Hard and Soft c and g
- Lesson 4: More R-Controlled Vowels (er, ir, or, ur)
- Lesson 5: Long a Spellings ai, ay
- Lesson 6: Long e Spellings ee, ey, ea
- Lesson 7: Long i Spellings y, igh, ie
- Lesson 8: Long o Spellings ow, oa, oe
- Lesson 9: Long u Spellings ue, ew, ou
- Lesson 10: Other Long Vowel Patterns
- Lesson 11: Long Vowel Sounds Review
- Lesson 12: Other Vowel Sounds oi, oy
- Lesson 13: Other Vowel Sounds ou, ow
- Lesson 14: Other Vowel Sounds aw, au
- Lesson 15: These Make More Than One Sound: oo and ea
- Lesson 16: Silent Starts: kn, wr, gn
- Lesson 17: Year-End Review