Venture Town Readers: A Language-Based Reading Series
By Judith Dodson
Venture Town Readers is an engaging series set in a bright, kind, and colorful world. The series is based in Venture Town, where fun and friendship lead the way as kids share their stories, their cultures, and their feelings.
The kids of Venture Town play and learn together within engaging stories designed to motivate and capture the imagination of your developing readers. As readers get to know the Venture Town kids, they connect and identify with them and learn to share in the adventures along the way. Students’ attachment to the characters enhances motivation to read from one story to the next and, while doing so, students consolidate their reading skills and develop into more automatic and effortless readers.
Venture Town’s lesson plans include explicit lessons in a variety of reading skills. The skills described in the upper and lower strands of The Reading Rope (Scarborough, 2001) include word recognition skills and language comprehension skills. The lessons for each book include:
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phonemic awareness practice,
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phonics word work
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dictation practice based on skills taught
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instruction in story-words (words which include skills that have not yet been taught)
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an enduring understanding
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a social and emotional theme
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related vocabulary networks and morphological connections
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connections to background knowledge
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the development of sentence comprehension
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responsive writing based on oral rehearsal.
We believe that readers will develop their comprehension skills and ability to read if instruction at every level includes both language-based skills as well as word-recognition skills.
Another unique feature that defines Venture Town Readers is a special emphasis on emotional literacy within the context of social and emotional themes threaded into the stories. The stories contain diverse characters and emphasize themes of friendship, recognition of one’s own feelings and the feelings of others, finding places that make us feel comfortable and safe, kindness, mistakes, and forgiveness.
Details of the Venture Town Lesson Plans:
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Venture Town Readers provide practice at the advanced phonics level that supports readers as they transition from the Full Alphabetic Phase (Ehri’s Phases of Word Learning, 1996) to the Consolidated Phase in which they will be able to read a broader variety of books and after opportunities for meaningful practice with various skills can become self-teachers.
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Venture Town Readers are Language-Based. The lesson plans are inclusive of the Language Comprehension Strands of The Reading Rope as well as the Word Recognition strands.
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Venture Town Readers place readers in the world of advanced phonics while providing them opportunities to review basic phonics concepts.
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Each series of books in Venture Town Readers will allow students to establish automaticity at that level, allowing students to practice at that level rather than moving on before skills have been mastered.
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Venture Town Readers offer stories that are centered around social and emotional learning with themes of friendship, respect, and diversity.
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Venture Town Readers provide oral language practice with all the concepts taught. Oral language is threaded throughout the lessons, including discussions of the enduring understanding for each book, using story words, and vocabulary words in sentences, meaningful oral rehearsal as students prepare for responsive written language exercises.
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Venture Town Readers are perfect for English Language Learners because of their diverse characters, deep foundational knowledge at the level at which they are written, oral language connections, direct instruction in vocabulary, morphological connections, language structure, background knowledge, comprehension questions and queries, and opportunities for guided responsive writing.
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Venture Town Readers include three supplemental short passages with each book that will extend students' knowledge of the information in the story and their knowledge of the world around them.
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Venture Town Readers include suggestions for how to use paired reading books that can provide aligned stories or information that can enhance students’ knowledge of the world and help transfer that knowledge from text to application in the real world.
See you soon in Venture Town!
