Your child's reading book looks odd. Here is why
Published 21 September 2026
Your child's reading book looks odd. Here is why
Published 21 September 2026
The short version
- Early reading books are written using only the sounds your child has been taught. That is why they read strangely.
- Your child is meant to be able to read every word. If they are guessing, tell the teacher.
- Keep reading proper stories to them as well. The two books do different jobs.
"This isn't a real story"
You are not wrong.
The book that came home in the book bag may have a thin plot, odd phrasing, and sentences no human would say out loud. Parents open them and quietly wonder whether the school has run out of money.
It is deliberate. These are decodable readers, and they are built to a rule: every word in the book uses only letters and sounds your child has already been taught.
That constraint is why "Sam sat on a mat" exists. There is not much you can do with the first dozen sounds, and the alternative — giving a child words they have no way of working out — teaches them to guess.
Why guessing is the thing to avoid
This is the single most useful thing on this page, so here it is plainly.
When your child gets stuck, the instinct is to help by pointing at the picture. Do not.
The government's own guidance for parents is explicit: encourage your child to sound out unfamiliar words and blend the sounds together from left to right, rather than looking at the pictures to guess.
Guessing looks like it is working. The child says "dog", you both feel pleased, and you move on. But they have not read the word — they have looked at a picture of a dog. The next time that word appears without a picture, they are stuck again, and now they have learned that reading is a guessing game.
Sound it out. Then blend it. Then talk about what it means.
So it should be easy?
Yes, mostly. That is the design.
Your child should be able to work out every word in a decodable reader, even if slowly. A bit of effort is fine. Struggling with half the page is not, and it means the book is at the wrong level or something has been missed.
Tell the teacher. Write it in the reading record — that is what it is for, and teachers read them. A note saying "this was hard, we did about half" is more useful to a teacher than a tick.
The same goes the other way. If your child reads it fluently in ninety seconds and is bored, say that too.
What about the book you read at bedtime?
Keep doing it, and do not swap one for the other.
The reading book and the bedtime story are doing two completely different jobs:
- The reading book teaches your child to turn letters into words. It is practice, and it should be within reach.
- The bedtime story is where they meet real language — jokes, plots, characters, and words nobody says out loud. It should be well beyond what they can read alone.
A five-year-old can follow a story far more complicated than they can decode. Reading aloud is how they get it, and it is where enjoying books comes from. The reading book with the school logo on it is not going to do that job.
Ask which scheme your school uses
One question at the school gate, and it makes everything else easier.
Different schools use different phonics schemes. They teach the same sounds, but in a different order, and sometimes with different names or actions for them.
If you buy a book set or an app that teaches the sounds in a different order, you can confuse your child — they will meet a sound they have not been taught and assume they should already know it.
So ask: "which phonics scheme do you use?" Every teacher can answer instantly, and then anything you buy or borrow can match.
Things that help at home
Magnetic letters. Build a word, then change one letter. cat to cot to cop. Being able to move the letters physically does something a screen does not.
Read the same book again. Children ask for repeats because repetition is how it becomes automatic. It is not a lack of progress.
Ten minutes, most days. Better than an hour on Sunday. If you miss days, miss them.
And ours
🔒 We do not have a game that teaches phonics, and we are not going to pretend we do.
We have a word game called Sound Ladder, and the name makes it sound perfect for this page. It is not — it is a puzzle about words that sound alike but are spelled differently, and it is built for children of seven and up who can already read.
For a child at the decodable-reader stage, the fridge magnets and the book bag are better than anything on a screen, including ours.
Where this comes from
- Phonics screening check: information for parents, Standards and Testing Agency, Crown copyright 2025 — the description of phonics, the sound-out-rather-than-guess advice, decodable readers and the reading record.
- The Reading Framework, Department for Education, July 2023 — checked against, not quoted.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
About us
And who we are: CrumbJar is a British puzzle-games studio. We make daily word and number games that children and adults play on a screen, and the games are free. So we have an interest in you thinking well of screens, and an interest in you buying things through our links. We would rather you knew that than found out.