The aim of Little Sprouts is to make a child's first steps into reading as simple as possible in order to build confidence and enjoyment. The first 10 books in this set offer the following decoding skills: single consonants, short vowels, consonant /z/ sound spelled s, initial and final consonant blends, inflectional ending - s. The next 10 books in set offer the additional decoding skill of final double consonants.
The Sprout Helper at the end of each book is designed to help educators guide students. It contains a list of the book’s decodable words and any irregular high-frequency words (sight words). Also included are questions to check students’ literal comprehension of what they have read.
Books are softcover, 20 to 28 pages in length.
Little Sprouts encompasses the first four sets of the larger Reading Sprouts series, a collection of graduated decodable readers. In all of the stories, the humor is geared to children so they will both enjoy what they are reading and incrementally build their reading skills and confidence. The Reading Sprouts books are the perfect start for both first-time readers and children with additional reading needs.
Little Sprouts uses primarily short-vowel, one-syllable words, and initial and final blends, presented in short simple sentences. As readers work their way through the sets, they encounter a gradually increasing number of letters per word, words per sentence, sentences per page, and pages per book. Irregular high-frequency words (sight words) are slowly introduced beginning in Set 2. These words are drawn from the Dolch 220 words by grade, in order of frequency.