What These Readers Actually Are
Curriculum Press Phonics Practice Readers are decodable text collections produced by Curriculum Resources International, a Utah-based publisher that has been around since the late 1980s. They are not a curriculum in the sense of being a full program with scope and sequence, teacher guides, and assessments baked into a single box. They are supplementary readers designed to give children practice applying specific phonics skills after instruction has been delivered through another source. That distinction matters more than people often realize. The books typically follow a predictable pattern: each title focuses on one or two targeted sound-spelling patterns, introduces a small set of sight words that cannot yet be sounded out, and keeps the narrative simple enough that the child is decoding rather than guessing. The illustrations are functional, not distracting. The reading level climbs gradually across the series.
Curriculum Press Phonics Practice Readers
Most educators I work with pull these for homework packets or intervention sessions. They pair well with any explicit phonics program because the texts line up with standard skill progressions. Short vowel sets come first, then digraphs, then silent-e patterns, with higher-level books introducing r-controlled vowels and multi-syllabic words. The order is fairly conventional. You can find them through the Curriculum Press website directly, through large educational resellers like Scholastic Teaching Store or Target, and through Amazon. They sell as individual titles or in bundled sets. Pricing varies depending on whether you are buying print copies or downloading PDF versions for classroom printing.
How to Use Them Without Wasting Time
The biggest mistake I see is assigning these readers as independent silent reading. That defeats the whole point. If a child is not actively sounding out the text, they are practicing something else entirely, usually guessing from pictures or memorized whole-word recognition. The practice becomes meaningless. Here is what actually works. Introduce the target pattern explicitly first. Spend ten to fifteen minutes teaching the sound-spelling connection with modeled reading, then have the child read the assigned book while you listen. They should be reading aloud, slowly, saying each sound. If they stumble on a word they can phonetically decode, do not give them the answer. Wait. Prompt them to say the sounds. Once they work it out, have them reread the sentence to confirm it makes sense. This takes about three to five minutes per book in a one-on-one setting. In a small group of four, plan for fifteen minutes with careful pacing. Anything longer and attention degrades faster than skill acquisition improves.
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A Problem I Hit and How I Fixed It
One edge case came up with a student who had already mastered short vowel sounds but was hitting wall after wall on the CVC blend books. He could decode individual words but his fluency dropped to a crawl, and he kept losing his place when the sentences got longer. I suspected his phonemic awareness was solid but his visual tracking and left-to-right habit were weak, so the books were exposing a gap I had not been targeting separately. The workaround was straightforward. I started having him run his finger under each word as he read, which forced a steadier pace. Then I introduced echo reading, where I would read a sentence first and he would repeat it. After two weeks of that combined with the original phonics practice, his accuracy jumped and the books stopped feeling like a slog. It was not the readers that were the problem. They were working exactly as designed.
What People Miss About These Books
The series does not teach comprehension strategies. There are no questions at the end, no discussion prompts, no vocabulary work attached to the texts. If your goal is building comprehension alongside decoding, you need to layer that in yourself. Read-aloud sessions with the same books, asking the child to retell the story or predict what happens next, will fill that gap without requiring you to buy additional materials. Another thing that gets overlooked is the sight word list that comes with each book. These are high-frequency words intentionally included because they cannot be fully decoded at the current skill level. Words like "the," "said," and "was" show up repeatedly. I recommend having students write these words out and use them in their own sentences before they start reading the book. Ten minutes of that prep work makes the actual reading session significantly smoother.
Where These Readers Fall Short
They are not appropriate for every child. Students who are severely behind on phonemic awareness, who struggle to distinguish individual sounds within words, will get frustrated very quickly. The books assume a baseline skill level that not every kindergarten or first-grade student has reached. In those cases, you need something more foundational, like direct phonemic awareness work using manipulatives or programs such as Lindamood-Bell or Wilson Reading System. The books also do not cover every phonics pattern in a comprehensive sequence. If your district follows a particular scope and sequence that emphasizes certain patterns before others, you may find gaps. The publisher provides a skills chart that lists what each book covers, so cross-referencing before you assign anything is a good habit. It saves time trying to figure out why a concept your curriculum just introduced is missing from the available titles. Print versions tend to run expensive if you are outfitting a full classroom. A set of twenty-four books can cost over a hundred dollars. The PDF download option brings the price down considerably, but you still need to handle printing and binding. Lamination helps them last longer but adds another layer of cost and effort. Most teachers I know buy a few copies for the classroom and assign the same titles as take-home readings through the PDF route.
Bottom Line
These readers do what they are supposed to do: provide controlled practice for specific phonics skills. They are not a complete program. They do not replace explicit instruction. They are a tool, and like any tool, they work well when used correctly and cause frustration when applied outside their intended purpose. Pair them with direct teaching, listen to the child read aloud, and make sure the target skill has actually been taught before handing over the book. That is the practical path that tends to produce results.
