Overview

Are you searching for engaging and fun beginning reading materials that supplement your early reading program? Well, look no further – the SandCastle Early Literacy Materials offer exactly what you need!

All 440 paperbacks in the 21 SandCastle Early Literacy Series are designed to aid students in mastering 5 specific aspects of early reading behavior – phonemic awareness, phonics instruction, fluency/guided reading, vocabulary instruction, and comprehension.

These paperbacks include full-color, engaging, multiculturally diverse photographs and illustrations that provide visual clues to the content. They use a combination of highlighted letters and words along with careful, deliberate sentence structure to promote reading success. These books also provide additional activities and facts, indexes, and picture glossaries or word lists to help students build their vocabulary skills.

Detailed Teacher’s Resource Guides are also available. They include lesson plans; easy-to-use, reproducible blackline masters; suggested classroom and at-home activities; and other resources. In addition, Accelerated Reader® Reading Practice Quizzes are available for 236 of these books.

> Click Here to download the list of SandCastle Book Titles (PDF 316 kb).

What Makes SandCastle Unique?

The 440 paperbacks in the SandCastle Early Literacy Series provide an effective and entertaining literacy experience that emphasizes early language arts development.

These paperbacks:

• Are designed to be used as supplemental materials in guided, shared, and independent reading environments.
• Present repetitive content and diverse context.
• Integrate reading, vocabulary, spelling, and writing in their approach to literacy instruction and interaction.
• Address a variety of learning styles with creativity, flexibility, and graduated levels of difficulty to ensure success at a variety of reading levels.
• Support state and national learning outcomes for kindergarten, first, and second grades.

The SandCastle Early Literacy Materials feature a single letter, blend sound, or language concept as the topic of one book. Each book utilizes engaging bright, colorful photographs and illustrations that provide a conscious, predictable visual clue to link text and meaning, thus enhancing comprehension.

• Books in the lower-level series use direct links between words and visuals. This provides practice in phonemic awareness and phonics by encouraging letter recognition, letter-sound associations, and word decoding.
• Books in the higher-level series use indirect links between words and visuals in less predictable, yet deliberate, presentations. This helps to build vocabulary, comprehension, and fluency skills.

In addition, all of the SandCastle Early Literacy Materials are designed to help students in kindergarten through second grade master the "book skills" identified in state standards: understand how a book is read; how to hold a book; reading left to right; and elements such as page numbers, title page, copyright, index, and glossary.

Teacher’s Resource Guides

All 24 of the Teacher’s Resource Guides for the SandCastle Literacy materials serve as comprehensive, yet easy-to-use, resources that enhance and extend the program’s impact.

These guides include:

• Concise, clear, and appropriate instruction for teachers and students.
• Lesson plans that build and strengthen early literacy skills.
• Classroom activities offering additional cross-curricular ideas to explore and expand literacy interactions.
• Reproducible blackline worksheet handout masters that provide added opportunity for reading and writing practice, while the simple multiple questions and fill-in-the-circle answers provide an introduction to standardized test-taking.
• At-Home Connection suggestions that offer ideas on how to extend the classroom literacy learning environment into the home.
• Additional resources for use in the classroom, at home, or online that provide opportunities beyond the structured curriculum.

About the Development Team & Approach

The SandCastle Early Literacy Materials were created by a team of educators, reading specialists, and content developers with over 15 years of experience in elementary reading instruction and over 10 years of experience in Guided Reading and Reading Recovery instruction. The books are produced by a professional editorial and design staff with over 20 years of experience publishing curriculum and training materials. Focus group studies were conducted to evaluate and assess the effectiveness of the content development and design process. Input and feedback from members of the early education community were solicited for each series.

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