Many children can read and recognize letters long before they can write them. They often go through the ABCs and can recognize and memorize many words that start with each letter. However putting each individual letter together to form words is more challenging, especially for those with English as a second language. This is where the role of phonics books for children come in.
What are phonics books?
Phonics books are a collection of story books, rhyming books, ABC books, workbooks, and other types of books that target a particular letter or phonics sound. For those who really want to enhance the phonics skills of their kids, they should try to explore each type of phonics book as they improve different aspects of their reading.
Story books are fun books that give a more natural way of reading a story, but repeat a particular sound to help them in speaking (reading a loud). Rhyming books target a specific sound and are important for children who struggle to understand patterns in phonics or how a phonics sound comes about. ABC books help with individual letters and are usually for younger children beginning with phonics. Workbooks reinforce phonics skills learned before and are a key revision tool for not only reading phonics and going through various exercises, but also instrumental for learning how to write letters.
What phonics books are best for children?
From our list of 25 phonics books for children, here is a short summary of some of the phonics books you should choose for your kid.
The Usborne First Reading Set has more fun and vibrant images for kids.
Bob Books, Primary Phonics and Fun tales have more words and less pictures (for kids who get easily distracted)
Hooked on Phonics Learn to Read Kit has many simple books to go through each sound
The Measured Mom Mini Phonics books are for children who need a slow start and lots of review of the phonics sounds
Usborne, Bob Books, Primary Phonics and the Measured Mom phonics books have lots of sight words together with sounding out the sounds.
Jolly Phonics focuses on phonics in the Jolly Phonics style (Not ABC way)
A Beka Phonics Readers start with vowels first and has a lot of review of the phonics words.
Homeworkbooks are a series of phonics workbooks to really improve their phonics skills.
Alpha Phonics Companion Readers is for children ready to read sentences with the same phonics sounds.
Peppa Pig Phonics is fun stories following your favorite character Peppa Pig.
The top 25 phonics books for children
| Number | Phonics Books Name | Price $ |
| 1 | Bob Books | $10 |
| 2 | Storybooks from Primary Phonics | $23.49 |
| 3 | Usborne- Very First Reading Set | $74.80 |
| 4 | Letterland Phonics Books | ~$9 |
| 5 | Pete the Cat Phonics | $10.19 |
| 6 | Learn to Read-Phonics Storybooks | $8.99 |
| 7 | Oxford Learning Tree_Floppy’s phonics | ~$28 |
| 8 | Measured Mom-Mini Phonics Books | Free |
| 9 | A Beka-Phonics Readers | $13.40 |
| 10 | Reading a-z, Phonics series | $115 |
| 11 | All About Reading | $80 |
| 12 | An Ant-Learn to Read | $13.30 |
| 13 | Jolly Phonics Activities Books | $6.50 |
| 14 | Big Preschool Workbook | $5.99 |
| 15 | HomeWorkBooks-Phonics Series | $3.49 |
| 16 | Fun Tales | $24 |
| 17 | First Phonics Readers-Wildflower Ramblings | $6 |
| 18 | Alpha-Phonics Companion Readers | $20 |
| 19 | Hooked on Phonics-Learn to Read Kit | $299 |
| 20 | Peppa Pig Phonics | $11.69 |
| 21 | Spectrum Phonics Books | $9.5 |
| 22 | Collings Easy Learning Phonics | $5.95 |
| 23 | Daily Phonics | $13.99 |
| 24 | Julia Donaldson’s Songbird Phonics | ~$10 |
| 25 | Learn to Read for Kids with Dyslexia | $13.29 |
1. Bob Books
Bob Books are a very simple and effective series of phonics books for children. These small books have basic sentences and simple drawings to not distract children too much from the sentences and words.
While this series of books may not cover all the important skills to improve phonics, it’s a very good introduction to sounds with simple text and drawings. Plus having many books is always fun for children.
A nice resource for FREE Bob books printables is thisreadingmama, where they provide free printable books and worksheets to help reinforce the phonics learned through Bob Books. (Note: we have no affiliation with thisreadingmama, just recommend it as a good source for free phonics books :))
2. Storybooks from Primary Phonics
Storybooks from Primary Phonics introduces simple phonics through its books. It’s series begins with simple consonant sounds that can be voiced without vowels, which can be hard for young children in the beginning. While the pictures and text may seem overly simple, its actually better to introduce phonics to children without very beautiful illustrations (sounds funny, right?), otherwise they will be too distracted to actually look at the words.
The Primary Phonics books also contain decodable stories, which allows children to use their phonics skills to read and “decode” the sound in each word and sentence.
3. Usborne’s Very First Reading
Usborne’s Very First Reading set is a nice series of phonics books that is fun for both children and their parents to read together. It has simple sentence structure for easy to read phonics and funny illustrations to make the stories interesting for kids.
This series has a fun feature where on the left page the adult or older reader has a more descriptive reading of the scene, and on the right the simple reading for the child. This allows more interaction between parent/child while reading, which many other phonics books simply don’t have.
Also, Usborne Publishing is a famous publishing company that produces many children’s books.
4. Letterland Phonics
Letterland phonics is highly popular and respected in phonics, not only by parents but teachers as well. In a sense they set the gold standard on how phonics can be learned in a fun way through letters (hence Letterland).
Their set 1 phonics books for learning phonics sounds through letters shaped like animals, and other series go on to story with phonics as a focal point.
If you want a single source of phonics knowledge that can provide you with many materials on how to learn phonics for your child, Letterland is the way to go. Checkout their Youtube videos for fun videos as well.
5. Pete the Cat Phonics
Pete the Cat Phonics books is a series of 12 story books which focus on a specific phonics sound. As the stories and sentences are a bit longer than simple 3 letter words, its recommended for kids who can already start reading and need a fun and interesting books series to help them along.
Their website also includes downloadable printables for your children including coloring, fill in the blanks, matching, mazes, memory games, rhyming, word games and spot the difference. Find the book here on Amazon.
6. Learn to Read Phonics Storybooks
The Learn to Read phonics story books is a series of 25 illustrated books to help reinforce kids’ love of learning to read, with phonics! They have cute pictures for kids to enjoy while they are reading the fun stories.
Plus they have two activities at the end of the book to practice the learned phonics sounds. At the current price on Amazon of $12, this set of phonics books could be a nice addition to your reading library.
7. Oxford Learning Tree Floppy’s phonics
The Oxford Learning tree is a famous publication of books, and their Floppy’s phonics books series is a nice addition to anyone’s reading resources. It comes with 48 story books with easy to read phonics sentences, along with 5 activity books and 72 flashcards.
This series of phonics books from Oxford learning will also introduce your children to the style of illustrations of the Oxford learning books, and can open a way to introduce them to other Oxford books which may interest them.
8. The Measured Mom Mini Phonics books
The Measured mom is a free online resource for learning phonics and has a very homely feel to it. Their mini phonics books series is nice to learn the phonics sounds, and has large text for easy teaching for parents.
They also offer priced developmental phonics books at their store to help reinforce phonics for your children. If you’ve used a lot of their free online phonics resources to help your kid learn, its a nice way of giving back and supporting them.
9. A Beka Phonics Readers
A Beka Phonics Readers is a series of simple phonics books for readers just being introduced to phonics (very young children). The text is large and has very simple words and sentences that focus on the CVC(Consonant vowel consonant) pattern to introduce phonics in words.
It’s important to note that as these books are very simple for young children, it may be too easy for most other children. So be sure to use these when your child is just being introduced to phonics to build their confidence.
10. Reading a-z phonics series
Reading a-z is an online source of books and study materials that I stumbled across a few years back while teaching English as a second language. Their online resources are MASSIVE! They have phonics books built into lessons and decodable books, read aloud books, sound/symbol books and flashcards.
In addition to the phonics books we mention, they also have thousands of books for children online in from their Reading a-z site, and also have other offshoots in Writing A-Z (for improving writing skills), Vocabulary A-Z (to improve vocabulary), Science A-Z (to help with science skills), and others. The current pricing starts at $115 per year, but if you plan on using this as a key resource and print out a lot of their books, it’s totally worth the price. (eg. if you want to print out 1 book per week to read, then its $2.20 per book).
We hope this list of the top phonics books for children helped you get a better idea of the books out there available to improve your little’s ones reading. In case you need more information on the phonics sounds of the letters a to z, checkout our phonics resource page to give you a better idea on how to practice each letter of the alphabet.