Phonics books for mature readers with humour? Try “Life Is A Joke”

The first four decodable books for older beginner readers available through our app were written at Level 2 of our phonics progression. These phonics books for mature readers also deal with some pretty serious themes: bullying, teen pregnancy, homelessness and…dystopian futures! With our new story and first Level 3 book, “Life Is A Joke”, we’re adding a little levity to the collection.  Not to mention a little teenage romance. Here’s the text of the narrated introduction to this decodable story.

Kate Mills is a normal teenager in Year 10 in high school dealing with all of the normal high school issues. However, she is also dyslexic and finds written schoolwork challenging. She loves to “write” but finds spelling hard so she keeps an audio diary on an app called “We Blog”. In this book we get to read Kate’s audio diary and her latest school assignment; her Life Log.

It is the end of January and Kate has a new assignment: she has to write a Life Log for Life Skills class in school. Quite unexpectedly, the Life Log assignment becomes a new craze, as does personalizing the book covers and decorating them with all kinds of glitter and craft stickers. Can Kate use this new craze to impress Jake Knox on February the 14th—Valentine’s Day?

Level 3 introduces the beloved and extremely useful split digraph commonly known as “silent e”. Also introduced are the graphemes ph, kn, wr, wh, gh, gn (corresponding to the phonemes /f/, /n/, /r/, /w/, /g/ and /n/ respectively)  Lastly, the s-/z/ grapheme-phoneme correspondence is also introduced.

You can read a sample of Life Is A Joke in the free-to-download Teen & Adult Phonics Library app for iPhone and iPad.  The app includes a sample of every decodable text in the our collection. This new title is also included in the TAP Library School Edition app available on the App Store and Google Play. We look forward to getting feedback on this newest addition to our digital phonics books for mature readers! (Just use the contact form.)