Reading Books

[Zipitydooda]

My DS in Reception has until now been bringing home reading books with no words and they have been learning the first sounds. He is now able to blend 3 sounds into words like cat, tap, not etc.
He has just bought home his first reading book with words but cannot read any of them. It is not a phonics based book and is all focused on key words (number words) that he's never encountered.
I'm really confused about the point of this as a 'reading' book. I expected books he could attempt to read by using the knowledge he's acquired so far.
Is this usual?

I agree Rafa and as much as I love the Oxford Owl site it requires parents to navigate around books to find those that are suitable because it mixes phonic books and look and say texts organised by mixed method banding criteria.
Songbirds books are great but they simply don't provide enough practise at the beginning when children are just starting to blend.

If the OP has an ipad, would the Dandelion launchers work alongside songbirds?

The sounds are in a different order, but the launchers and stage 1+ are essentially both dealing with phase 2/first part of phase 3 so could be used together to give a bit more practice.

Not The Book People ORT unless they are specifically 'Floppy's Phonics'. Otherwise they're just more of the same Look & Say books that the OP is trying to avoid.

The Dandelion Launcher iBooks give lots of practise. I'd probably start with those then use the Songbirds (stage 1&2)

Hi Zipity,

Like you we had non-phonics readers from school and they didn't seem to have anything else (this was a few years ago, things have improved since then at our school). What I did was decode the words for my child - eg 'this says SAID, in this word the AI says EH' (sorry prob v poor phonetic spelling). Even though it wasn't ideal, at least DD was getting some exposure to phonics and although I read most of the first few weeks' books, she soon got the idea of a lot of what I was talking about.