Where to start with a reader who is behind
One page a child reads out loud. You mark where they stop. That stop tells you which phonics practice will land this week — and which will be a waste of the photocopier.
- 5 minutes a child
- 8 rungs — sounds, not grades
- 7 pages — black and white
Get the ladder — freeSee the method
Nothing to join. One email a week, and one click stops them.
Tap the rung your reader stops on — we will tell you what to teach next.
Rung 4 — digraphs. Teach next: two letters making one sound, one digraph at a time.
Independent work sits one rung below, on all five short vowels. Built for this rung: Digraph worksheets (F010).
Stop at the first rung they miss more than half of. The rung below it is what they can hold alone; the rung they stopped on is what you teach.
Send me the reading ladder
PDF · 7 pages · prints in black and white · nothing dated on any of them.
- A child’s page in large print — the eight rungs, nothing else on it
- A teacher’s record sheet, with how to read a slow-but-right stop versus a guess from the first letter
- A class grid — shade where each child stopped and the groups draw themselves
- A map from each rung to the practice built for exactly that rung
Where should we send it?
One file, straight away.
About one email a week, and you can unsubscribe from any of them in one click. We will not sell your address or send it anywhere else. Privacy.
The question nobody answers on a product page
We went and read 347 questions that teachers typed on other people’s listings before they paid for anything. The single most common one, more than a third of them, was some version of the same thing:
“Will this actually fit my group?”
And the sharpest one in the pile was this, from a teacher whose problem no grade label can describe:
“I teach refugee newcomers in grades 7, 8, 9 but reading at grade 1–3 levels.”
Children are not sorted by the number on the classroom door. They are sorted by which sounds they can already hold. So that is what the ladder measures, and nothing else.
How it works — the whole method, right here
You do not need the download to do this. If you would rather write the rungs on a sticky note and skip us entirely, that is a completely fine outcome.
- Sit beside one child. Next to them, not across the desk.
- Say it is not a test. Tell them they can say pass at any point and you will stop. Then keep that promise.
- Work down eight rungs — letter sounds, short a, all five short vowels, digraphs, blends, heart words, a whole sentence, longer words.
- Stop at the first rung they miss more than half of. That rung is the answer.
- Stop early anyway. The moment a child struggles twice you already have what you came for. Pushing on just teaches them that reading with you feels bad.
Five minutes a child. The rung below the stop is what they can hold on their own — that is your independent work. The rung they stopped on is what you teach.
PDF · 7 pages · prints in black and white
What is in the download
- A child’s page in large print — the eight rungs, nothing else on it
- A teacher’s record sheet, and how to read a stop that is slow-but-right versus a stop that is guessing from the first letter
- A class grid — shade where each child stopped and the groups draw themselves
- A map from each rung to the practice built for exactly that rung
What it will not do
It is a quick sort, not a full inventory. It samples the code — six letters, not twenty-six. It will put a reader on the right rung. It will not give you a score, a reading age, or anything you could put in a report. If you need a defensible picture of one skill, you want a proper probe with parallel forms, and this page is not that.
We would rather say that here than have you find it out at a meeting.
PDF · 7 pages · prints in black and white
Why we can point you to the right set
Every set we make prints its own scope on the page: the sounds taught so far, the heart words a child may know by sight, and the names used in the stories. Any word on the page has to come from one of those three lists. That is what lets you audit a worksheet at the photocopier in about ten seconds — and it is why a map from a rung to a set can be honest instead of a sales pitch.