Don’t restrict students to decodable readers. It’s a little like trying to feed an elephant one blade of grass at a time.   Reading decodable books has an important place in structured literacy programs for dyslexic students, but recently some in the reading community have been calling for “phonics-only” or “phonics-first” and this is not a good idea. Recently Emeritus Literacy Professor Timothy Shanahan from the University of Illinois at Chicago has also called these policies as overreach. From his recent blog post: “The National Reading Panel report (2000) is oft cited as the major support for phonics instruction. We found (I was a member of the panel) that explicit, systematic phonics instruction helped students to become better readers – based on a meta-analysis of […]