At the River and Other Stories for Adult Emergent Readers

I purchased this book for each of my adult literacy students. Tears were in my eyes when I heard my most "challenged" student read "Bob and Pam's Family" (p. 48) without any assistance. Shelley's simple stories and repetition of basic words makes it possible for any student to find success.

We use this book every quarter with adult ELL beginning readers in an ELL level 1 class. It is easy to follow and the repetition of sounds, short words and sentences really helped my students learn the basics of reading. We will continue to use this book with our beginning readers and then they can move on to the 2nd book in the series, At the Lake.

I bought this for adults who are just learning to read English. There were many phonic sounds and elements that I wanted them to practice. This book covers some, but not as many as I had hoped.

Gift for my father. He loves the book and is always talking about what he read to me.

Great product! Not only for adult emergent readers. I'm using it for a 3rd grader who is still decoding sight words. Love that it's for ESL students!

“At the River and Other Stories for Adult Emergent Readers” by Shelley Hale Lee, a veteran English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher, is a 133-page book published by Wayzgoose Press in 2016. Written for ESL students with low literacy (i.e., both nonliterate and semiliterate students), “At the River” is the ideal book for teaching beginning reading and writing to such English Language Learners (ELL’s). This is because “At the River” adopts a non-condescending approach toward assisting ELL’s who are not literate in their own first languages (L1’s) or who speak languages without an alphabet or script. Additionally, the book is effective in teaching ELL’s with low literacy to read and write short, simple essays and narratives with dialogue via pictures and by continuously building on the phonetic units covered in previous lessons.“At the River” is structured and scaffolded in a manner wherein students both learn to pronounce and write the sounds of individual letters, blends, words, and complete sentences. Furthermore, students read these letters, words, and sentences in paragraphs whose complexity progressively deepens unit to unit. Beginning with the first unit (pp. 1-7), students learn how to read and write 10 words and three logically related sentences using eight of those vocabulary units. Accompanying pictures are provided for the vocabulary covered in that unit, as is the case for units two to eight (pp. 8-112). By units nine and 10 (pp. 113-129), students acquire multiple words to read, write, and comprehend narratives with dialogue reflective of real-world exchanges and incidents.The page entitled “To the Teacher” (immediately following the copyright page) provides a link to “[a] full teacher’s guide with notes, suggestions, a detailed lesson plan with a page-by-page unit walk-through, and extra activities” (To the Teacher). It is free of charge and available for download. (Although not the focus of this review, the teacher’s guide for “At the River” would be helpful for a new ESL teacher, with limited or scant classroom experience, using this book.)“At the River,” as previously noted, is written for nonliterate and semiliterate ELL’s. However, because of its simplicity and effectiveness, this text an also be used as a primer by parents of and tutors for kindergarten and first grade students in bilingual, dual-immersion programs wherein most of their didactic instruction, language input and output, and language acquisition activities are centered around the target language other than English. Concerned parents who have reasoned that their children, enrolled in such programs, do not have preliminary or beginning English literacy can use this book to help them acquire the fundamentals or basics of reading and writing in English. Also, homeschoolers attempting to instruct their children in two or three languages will also find “At the River” a blessing with assisting their students in developing beginning English literacy. Lastly, parents and educators, seeking to help monolingual English-speaking children develop basic literacy from pre-kindergarten or kindergarten to first grade, will find “At the River” a beneficial tool in guiding their students in reading and later composing short, simple compositions and narratives with dialogue.

As a long-time teacher of adult emergent readers, I'm always on the lookout for new materials that I can use with my students. I'm really impressed with how well scaffolded this book is; each lesson builds upon the one before, and there are lots of integrated opportunities for review and building up basic writing skills. Word family work is a big part of each lesson so that students get lots of practice recognizing spelling patterns and sounds. I do wish that the illustrations in the book were more reflective of the student populations that I work with; it's always really nice to be able to give my refugee students stories with illustrations of people who look and live like them. Also, due to the fact that the book is built around basic word families, some of the vocabulary included in the book are words that my students will never use in their daily lives. However, as the stories get longer and more complex, there are wider options for vocabulary, so this isn't much of an issue in the second half of the book.

As a Level 1 Adult ESL teacher, I have found "At the River" to be exactly what my students needed! Its clear, systematic approach guides both literacy and literate students through the shapes and sounds of the English language, culminating in a series of decodable stories that are fresh, interesting, and relevant to students' lives. Although the book is geared towards emergent readers, even literate English language learners can benefit from explicit instruction in English phonics and sentence structure. I would recommend this book for teachers of adults (or children!) who are learning to decode.