Book Review: Dragon Eggs Series
Phonics Books – Dragon Eggs Series
At a glance
- A superb portfolio of highly structured and decidable phonic story books
- Step-by-step progression for successful outcomes
- Reading practice with a laser sharp phonic focus
- Synthetic phonics resources that sparkle
- Top quality and colourful books packed with excitement
Phonics knowledge is considered one of the key predictors of reading success and getting the right resources is therefore crucial.
To comprehend what is being read, children must be able to decode words and join the parts quickly and accurately so they can interpret and analyse words while reading. That is what Phonics Books are all about.
Their new collection of books introduces words and word structures in a carefully planned scope and sequence to support reading accuracy, speed and expression.
A common criticism of decodable books is that their inherent language constraints make them boring and stilted. Well Phonic Books certainly aren’t; these are exciting, adventurous and multidimensional.
Constructing meaning from written language requires making a connection to oral language and must be connected to an individual’s phonological memory. One of the most powerful ways to make this connection is through stories, explicit instruction on learning to read and relentless practice – this is where Phonic Books excel.
Their Dragon Eggs series is a daring decodable reading quest that breathes quality and class throughout. This delightful new collection of ten books is one splash of colour after another with really outstanding artwork for maximum engagement that will turn children’s heads. With appealing characters and a really reader-friendly layout, these books are ones that children won’t want to let go of.
The back of the books all have a clearly flagged target phoneme along with a brief description of the story to set the scene. Inside there is a page showing the words that make up the specific reading practice, chapter contents and a vocabulary page explaining some of the story words. Within each chapter there are also some multi-syllable words that are helpfully split up for readers.
The story chapters are an explosion of imagination and are short and sweet too making them ideal for keeping attention.
What I like most is that these books expose children to highly consistent and prolific patterns in the text and they get practice with letter-sound correspondences that they can apply to other texts.
These books are the perfect partner for helping children to segment individual sounds in words and they will show how these sounds are represented by letters and how to blend the sounds/letters into words.
They also make sense as mini-stories and build knowledge because teachers can have rich conversations about the chapters asking comprehension questions to demonstrate that reading is about meaning.
To support this series is a wonderful workbook containing a wide range of reading, spelling and comprehension activities and games linked to the stories
The Dragon Eggs series clearly have the potential to narrow the gap in reading achievement and I’d use them like a set of reliable training wheels on a bicycle.
The verdict
- Purposeful and playful phonics for explicit and systematic instruction
- Builds automaticity in bottom-up skills so that words fly off the page
- Benefits decoding, word reading, text comprehension, reading stamina and spelling
- Equips children with reading strategies
- Helps develop reading fluency and comprehension in tandem.
Upgrade if…
you are looking for a fast-track decodable approach to teach reading fluency and encourage reading independence.
Cost: The cost of the series is £39.00 and the workbook is priced at £25.00