Ann Staman

I am a reading specialist and education writer. I feel fortunate to have found a way to combine my love of books, writing, and teaching reading--through creating materials for beginning readers.

My most recent (and favorite!) publications are 120 leveled books for beginning readers in kindergarten and first grade: Handprints (published by EPS Literacy and Intervention). These books have been assigned Reading Recovery (TM) and Guided Reading levels. The levels begin at nonreader and progress to level of independent reading.

There are both fiction and nonfiction books in the Handprints series. As I wrote the books, I paid close attention to high frequency words, sentence structure, decoding opportunities, story structure, format, and more. My aim was to provide opportunities for gradually challenging beginning readers.

In a "former life" (before Reading Recovery) I wrote workbooks for beginning readers. My first workbook series was Starting Comprehension. At the time when I created the series, there were few comprehension materials for first graders. One strand is geared toward phonetic reading, and the other toward children who do better with sight word memorization. My second set of workbooks is Clues to Meaning, with meaning-based activities in decoding.