Age 6-8 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
Age 6-8 Reading is the second and final level of our reading program.
Before beginning this level, your child should be able to:
- Read short and long vowel spellings
- Recognize common blends and digraphs
- Read R-controlled vowels
- Read and comprehend simple early readers
- Write simple sentences independently
* If your child has not mastered these skills you may consider starting with our Age 5-7 Reading where these skills are taught.
What Is Included
The following items are included in the Age 6-8 Full Year Reading Package. We are currently finalizing this kit, so the final kit may vary from what is shown below.
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.
17 First Semester 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, relatable characters, and unexpected plot twists.
5 Second Semester Literature Books
In the second semester, your child will be increasing in her reading abilitiies, and we introduce trade books for her to read and practice.
Shared Reading
Each lesson begins with a Shared Reading that you and your child 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.
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 58 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.
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 28 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.
Theme Word Cards
The 14 theme word cards are used to build reading confidence through contextual learning and vocabulary building in the second semester. Each card contains eight words relevant to a particular topic or theme. When children learn to read words in context, it improves their understanding of the words' meanings and usage. Regular practice can help improve sight word recognition, and students begin to recognize words instantly without needing to decode them.
Posters, Memory Cards, a Blank Booklet, Laminated Writing Sheet, Markers, and More
Beyond the Page Reading also comes with materials students will use to practice writing. These include posters, memory cards, plurals memory cards, a blank booklet, notecards, one laminated handwriting sheet, two dry-erase markers, paper plates, sidewalk chalk, wrist bands, and more.
Table of Contents
Semester 1
- Lesson 1: Word Families and Long Vowel Review
- Lesson 2: Vowel Teams Review
- Lesson 3: Complex Consonants Review
- Lesson 4: R-Controlled Vowels Review
- Lesson 5: More R-Controlled Vowels
- Lesson 6: Other Vowel Sounds
- Lesson 7: More Long Vowel Spellings
- Lesson 8: Vowel Sounds Review
- Lesson 9: Complex Consonants: dge vs. ge
- Lesson 10: Complex Consonants: tch vs. ch, ck vs. k
- Lesson 11: Final e: ce, ve, ze, se
- Lesson 12: Homophones
- Lesson 13: Making Plurals
- Lesson 14: Uncommon Plurals
- Lesson 15: Words Ending with ed and ing
- Lesson 16: Words Ending with er and est
- Lesson 17: Semester Review
Semester 2
- Lesson 1: Compound Words
- Lesson 2: Syllable Division
- Lesson 3: Words Ending in y
- Lesson 4: Syllables with R-Controlled Vowels
- Lesson 5: Closed and Open Syllable Practice
- Lesson 6: Possessives
- Lesson 7: Contractions
- Lesson 8: Syllables Ending in e
- Lesson 9: Vowel Sounds
- Lesson 10: Review of Lessons 1-9
- Lesson 11: Three-Syllable Words
- Lesson 12: Suffixes
- Lesson 13: Prefixes
- Lesson 14: Words Starting with q or a
- Lesson 15: Semester Review
- Final Project: Write Your Own Story