Celebrating Poetry Month with a New Decodable Picture Book in Verse

It's April and I'm celebrating National Poetry Month with the release of my new decodable picture book, The Box. It's a sassy retelling in verse of Pandora's Box. If you have read any of my recent decodable books, you know that I use poetry to create fun ways for older struggling readers to practice syllable patterns. The Box is on sale on Amazon. It is the third installment in the Greek Creation Myth series. You can get the first book No Gift for Man as a free PDF download when you sign up for my newsletter HERE. The second book is The Bandit, a retelling of Prometheus stealing fire for the first humans. Together, these three full-color 32-page picture books form the Greek Creation Myth. 

If you would prefer a chapter book version of the same stories with black and white illustrations for older students, watch for Gods and Gifts coming this summer. It's a 95-page chapter book that includes the same three story poems above. In addition, it is filled with background information about the discovery of fire, the origins of the Greek alphabet, and comparisons to indigenous myths.

To celebrate my new book, I have created a simple and fun poetry-writing activity called Pandora's Lunch Box which will appear in my next blog post. But first, to prepare for that activity, I'd like to talk about list poems and how I use them to create decodable books. Decodable books contain stories that focus on using words with specific syllable patterns. These patterns follow a scope and sequence that has been taught to students using a structured literacy and Science of Reading (SoR) approach. You can read more about decodable books on my WEBSITE.

These are my steps for creating a list poem that also serves as a decodable book:

1. First, I study a list of decodable words that fit a certain pattern. For the three stories in the Greek creation myth, I focused on closed-syllable words. Closed syllables contain only short vowel sounds. 

Some of the words for The Box follow a straight consonant-vowel-consonant CVC pattern (tin, box, lid). 

Some have consonant blends at the beginning of the word - CCVC (spit, slop, trap). 

Some have consonant blends at the end of a word - CVCC (bend, band, gift). 

Some of the words have blends at the beginning and the end - CCVCC (craft, swift, swept).

There are even some multi-syllable words, which I split into syllables for students who have not learned that skill (dis-tant, at-tic, splen-did, ). 

If the stressed syllable comes later in the word, I make that syllable bold (dis-con-tent-ment, prob-lem-at-tic, in-dig-nant). 

By breaking large words into manageable parts and highlighting certain stressed syllables, I'm able to include more sophisticated words for older students who are ready for higher-level vocabulary but still face challenges with decoding and reading basic syllable patterns. 

2. As I study the word lists, an idea begins to emerge for ways to group the words together. Then I come up with a theme or concept. For The Box, I made a list of all of the bad and annoying things that might come out of Pandora's box (mumps, strep, slips, bumps) Then I got a bit silly with my list and added things like dentist drills and rotten eggs.

3. After I generate a list of theme-related words and phrases, I join them together in stanzas of rhyming verse.

Ban-dits with a dras-tic plot,

pans that rust and eggs that rot.

Tun-nel traps and den-tist drills.

Ants in pants and milk that spills.

You will notice that the lines of poetry above don't follow typical sentence structure patterns. That is often true of poetry. It is the reason that poems are difficult to analyze using grade-level metrics that are based on sentence length. 

As mentioned above, the story I created for The Box is based on the structure of a list poem. A list poem focuses on a list of related people, places, things, or ideas with a lead-in and a conclusion. The structure of a list poem works well for my decodable books since the purpose is to provide students a fun way to practice lists of words in a meaningful context.

4. After I write my poem, I create an Introduction to provide additional background information and context. I use the ATOS scale to determine an approximate reading level for that part of the book. The introduction for The Box is written at a fifth-grade reading level which means it can be read independently by students with a fifth-grade reading level and with support by students reading at a fourth-grade level. It may also be read aloud by an adult in a strategy I call Pair and Share Reading. To find more information on how ATOS reading levels are calculated, visit ATOS. Their analyzer tool is free.

5. Finally, I make a list of the words in the poem that don't follow the specified patterns. This list might include irregular words such as was, of, does, or words with concepts and patterns that have not yet been introduced such as th or wh in with, that. when. That way students can practice these words before they read the story poem.

That's it! Then I ask someone familiar with the scope and sequence to proofread my work to make sure I followed the patterns. Another reviewer looks specifically at the rhyme and meter of the poems. Then I find an illustrator. Here is one of the internal illustrations from The Box. It was created by a company called 1000 Storybooks. They also made the cover.

Finally, I create an Activity Book, online games, and an audiobook. I'm still working on those things for The Box. In the meantime, go to the page for COR Instruction on my website to find several free activities for Book 1. Scroll to the bottom to locate the FREE Plot Analysis Activity for the entire three-book Creation Story. Also applicable to all three books are a set of electronic Boom Card games called Four in a Row (similar to Connect 4). This closed syllable deck includes 8 different games that may be used for in person or online learning.

Information about other books and resources may be found on my WEBSITE. 

Watch for the FREE Pandora's Lunch Box activity coming in a few days. It will be based on a list poem inspired by The Box.

The word lists I use come from the Sounds In Syllables (SIS) program created by Sandra Dillon and used at the Multisensory Language Training Institute of New Mexico which is currently run by Mary Gilory and Erin Brown. They offer online training for those interested in becoming a dyslexia therapist and a Certified Academic Language Therapist (CALT). This is the training that I went through to get my CALT certification and I highly recommend it. They have a new Summer 2024 Cohort starting June 12 with an Introductory class on Zoom.

Last but not least, sign up for my newsletter HERE and receive a free copy of my first decodable book, No Gift for Man.