The Ruggit

If you are struggling to find enjoyable books that are decodable in the early stages of Letters and Sounds, you will love Yellow Door’s new Ragtag Rhymes series. This article focuses on The Ruggit a new title from the series. The aim of Ragtag Rhymes is to offer children rich, using knowledge acquired in Letters and Sounds Phase 2. As a result, they will learn about the joys of reading at the same time as they acquire the skills of decoding text.

Read the books aloud to let the children enjoy the humour, rhyme and alliteration. Explore and talk about the pictures, and encourage the children to apply their developing phonic knowledge to the text. Each book focuses on a particular initial letter sound, in this case r. All of the stories use only the letter-sound correspondences plus the high frequency words from Phase 2 of the Letters and Sounds programme.

Discuss the cover

Talk about The Ruggit’s cover (Open the eBook, available below). Read the title, noting that it contains a nonsense word, and invite the children to comment on what they think it refers to. (The purple character in the illustration.) Then look at the illustration as a class and ask the children what they think the book might be about and what sort of character the ‘ruggit’ is. Do the children agree with each other?