Resources to Support Moonlit Mountain Readers

This assessment is best used as a formative assessment—as a quick but effective way to determine what word reading skills to teach next. Therefore, check-ins with students should be brief (about 5 minutes) and should usually involve only those sections of the overall assessment most likely to give key information that you can use to plan your next steps for instruction.

Moonlit Mountain Readers follow a systematic research-based phonics progression. Each book provides concentrated decoding practice with new phonics features, building skills step by step. For instance, when introducing a digraph like "ch," early texts focus on simple three-phoneme words such as chop and much before gradually incorporating more complex words like chunk or stench.This intentional approach ensures that readers gain confidence with new concepts while reinforcing previously learned skills.

While the Moonlit Mountain Readers and Jump Rope Readers series generally follow the same phonics scope and sequence, some variations exist. The phonics scope and sequence outlines the alignment and explains any deviations.

Moonlit Mountain Readers is a decodable text collection designed to support beginning readers, from the earliest stages of decoding development to the advanced. The collection is built upon a systematic, cumulative phonics sequence that ensures children can successfully decode increasingly complex texts, all the while engaging with rich, highly comprehensible stories.