1. Decide which series to start with using our diagnostic assessment.
2. Explicitly teach the new letters and sounds to your student. 
3. Use the relevant decodable book to practice and consolidate the phonics skills taught.
4. Develop your student’s reading fluency and confidence using the activities from the fully reproducible activity books that are based on the story in the accompanying readers.

1. Dandelion Launchers is a fiction series which introduces words at a CVC-level, consonant digraphs, tch, le, ve, and suffixes -ed and -ing. The books have one or two lines of text per page, and all the books have cumulative progression so that the phonics skills taught in the first book are practiced in the second and so on. 
2. Dandelion World follows the same scope and sequence as the Dandelion Launchers series. This nonfiction series covers special interest topics, so it helps students develop their world knowledge while simultaneously building literacy. Each book has a “knowledge builder” section that introduces more information and vocabulary on the subject. 
3. Dandelion Readers introduce vowel digraphs. To help build reading stamina, they include more text per page than Dandelion Launchers and Dandelion World.
4. There are accompanying activity books for each reader set which link to the stories in the readers. The activity books are fully reproducible and they have activities to build reading fluency, spelling, and writing.

You can see the scope and sequence of each reader set here.

Top tips to ensure success

1. Make sure that the student has been taught the target phonemes and spellings in the book before starting to read the decodable book. Some activities in the complementing workbook will help with this.
2. Encourage the student to read new words by blending sounds together rather than by guessing.
3. If the student does not know a spelling (grapheme), you can fill in the missing knowledge by telling them what it is. Then, ask them to blend all the sounds into the word.
4. High-frequency words, or heart words, can be treated like any other new word. Help the reader with the part they do not know. Ask them to blend the sounds into the word.
5. With beginner readers, re-read the sentence after the student has read it to help comprehension.
6. Discuss new vocabulary, characters, plot, and illustrations to develop language and engagement.
7. Read in short bursts with beginner readers, as decoding can be very tiring initially. Take turns reading pages or paragraphs.
8. Build up the amount of time you read for, slowly increasing it as the child's reading skills progress.
9. Repeated reading will help with fluency, so ask the student to read the same text to different people or to read it a second time with expression and intonation, for example.
10. Be patient! Give the student plenty of time to work out new words. Reading is hard work and demands concentration and application.
11. Make sessions as multi-sensory as possible. Children take on board new learning much more easily when they are having fun and using multiple senses. Use activities that involve them looking, hearing, moving, and speaking about things. 
12. Use a lot of praise and encouragement.