Introducing the Reading Ready for Whole Phonics™ Teacher Guide

For decades, researchers and educators have sought to answer an essential question: How do we ensure every child learns to read?  While there’s no single formula, one truth remains clear - children thrive when they receive explicit, systematic, and joyful reading instruction supported by high-quality materials.

That belief drives the work of Dr. Katie Pace Miles, a professor who is the director of the Reading Science program at Brooklyn College;  founder of The Reading Institute; and creator of Reading Ready, a proven early literacy intervention that helps young readers build decoding skills and confidence. As Katie continued refining her program, she saw an opportunity:

What if Reading Ready expanded into a full small-group curriculum paired with engaging, culturally responsive decodable books?

Enter Jill Lauren, founder of Whole Phonics™— a beloved series of decodable books known for their strong phonics scope and sequence, humor, meaningful storylines, and diverse characters. Admired by educators, families, and young readers across all fifty states and twenty countries, Whole Phonics™ captured Katie’s attention not only as a literacy expert but also as a parent watching her own children light up while reading them.

That spark of joy led to one simple question: “Want to partner?”

The answer was an enthusiastic yes- and from that shared passion for research-based literacy instruction, the Reading Ready for Whole Phonics Teacher Guide was born.

Anchored in the belief that learning to read is every child’s right, the guide equips teachers with clear, effective tools to ensure all students succeed. Grounded in research, it embraces phonics as the key that unlocks fluent reading, stronger comprehension, and a lifelong love of books.

Designed to pair seamlessly with Whole Phonics™ books, the Reading Ready for Whole Phonics Teacher Guide offers step-by-step lessons that are both teacher-friendly and highly effective. Each decodable book is accompanied by three days of structured, 50–60-minute lessons featuring six essential components:

1. Phonemic Awareness Practice – Listening for, segmenting, and blending sounds.

2. Letter–Sound Practice – Learning and reviewing letter–sound correspondences.

3. Word Practice – Reading and spelling decodable words.

4. Sentence Practice – Warming up with connected text and high-frequency words.

5. Decodable Book Practice – Reading engaging stories to apply new phonics knowledge and reinforce old phonics skills.

6. Writing Practice – Encoding sounds, words, and sentences to strengthen reading and handwriting.

Together, these activities build mastery across phonemic awareness, phonics, spelling, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension - everything young readers need to thrive.

The partnership between Reading Ready and Whole Phonics™ brings together the best of both worlds: evidence-based instruction and stories children truly love to read. The result is a powerful, accessible tool for small-group teaching that empowers educators and sparks success for every beginning reader.

The Reading Ready for Whole Phonics Teacher Guides are now available at 

www.whole-phonics.com

The Reading Ready for Whole Phonics Teacher Guide provides a clear, research-aligned roadmap so they can deliver structured literacy lessons with conviction, consistency, and strong support for emergent readers.

Step-by-step lesson support

The guides provide scripted, highly detailed lesson plans that walk teachers through each day’s instruction, reducing planning time and guesswork. Each lesson is tied to a rigorous phonics scope and sequence, so teachers know exactly which skills to introduce, review, and assess in a logical progression.

Strong alignment to decodable texts

Lessons are directly connected to highly controlled Whole Phonics decodable readers, so the words and patterns students encounter in texts match what was explicitly taught. This one-to-one alignment helps teachers ensure that students are always practicing with “just-right” books that reinforce the target skills, building confidence along the way. 

Translating research into daily practice

The guides are designed to translate science of reading research into concrete classroom routines, addressing phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension within a structured literacy framework. This helps both new and experienced teachers implement research-based practices without needing to design their own scope, routines, or materials from scratch.

Classroom consistency and differentiation

Because the guides are systematic and explicit, they support instructional consistency across classrooms and small groups, which is especially helpful for teams and intervention settings. The structure also makes it easier for teachers to spot who is not yet secure with a skill and to provide targeted extra practice using aligned activities and texts.

Whether you’re a teacher, literacy coach, administrator, or parent, these guides provide a clear, joyful path to helping every child become a confident, skilled reader.

Assessments

A brief, one-on-one entry-level assessment establishes a starting point for instruction. Student performance on two tasks, nonsense word reading and sentence reading, determines the unit in which a student should be placed.

End-of-unit assessments, also conducted one-on-one, are used to determine mastery of a specific skill in words and sentences for each unit. There are three brief assessment measures: nonsense word reading, sentence reading, and sentence writing. The teacher can tailor instruction according to data driven suggestions. 

Happy teaching!