About "The Reading Puzzle Series": In her best-selling book "Teach Them All To Read", Elaine McEwan provides a great discussion of the most current reading research regarding how students learn to read so educators can make informed decisions about instruction. Research about reading has given us insight into the skills on which we need to focus our efforts to improve reading and comprehension. Now we can identify the skills that require reinforcement and intervene with explicit, thoughtful instruction. The activities in "The Reading Puzzle Series" will help the teacher accomplish this goal. "The Reading Puzzle Series" provides instructional tools teachers can use immediately as part of the reading curriculum. "The Reading Puzzle Series" contains 10 books for Kindergarten through Grade 8 centered on the skills identified by the National Reading Panel as critical to reading success. Each of these books in the series helps unlock one piece of the reading puzzle and contains standards-based, ready-to-use activities that can be used to supplement any reading program. "Phonemic Awareness", "Grades K-3 Phonics", "Grades K-3 Vocabulary", "Grades K-3 Fluency", "Grades K-3 Comprehension", "Grades K-3 Word Analysis", "Grades 4-8 Spelling", "Grades 4-8 Vocabulary", "Grades 4-8 Fluency", "Grades 4-8 Comprehension" - these activity books contain ready-to-use activities that make it easy to put McEwan's highly-successful strategies into practice. The strategies and activities will support struggling readers and enhance existing skill to encourage improvement in all students' reading skills. Phonics plays a critical role in reading instruction. Without a solid foundation in phonics, students will continually struggle with literacy. Explicit, systematic, supportive phonics instruction, taught as stand-alone instructional component but within the context of a print-rich classroom environment with a significant literature base, is an absolutely essential (although certainly not sufficient) piece of the reading puzzle particularly for at-risk students. The activities in this resource are presented in an order that will help you deliver explicit and systematic phonics instruction - consonants, short vowels and long vowels, consonant blends and digraphs, sight words, and compound words. This resource offers many engaging and stimulating activities to teach students how to discern the similarities and differences between letters and sounds. The activities include chants and games that will motivate students and encourage them to practice and further develop their phonics skills. The ideas also address different learning styles to meet the needs of all students. These activities can be used during whole-group or small-group instruction as well as in independent learning stations. The activities include many ready-to-use reproducibles that require very little preparation. This will help give you more teaching time to spend providing differentiated instruction in workshop. The lesson content in "Phonics K-3" not only provides an explicit and systematic course of instruction but also offers high-interest activities to keep students on target. Phonics instruction is a key foundation for learning to read and is necessary to ensure that your students will become lifelong readers.