Total Words
By Achieve Psychology for Learning
Total Words books are designed to increase reading accuracy and speed, inspire readers, and provide teachers with clear evidence of measured reading progress.
Read, Progress, Achieve
Meaningful resources motivate students. Total Words books are intellectually meaningful — real scenarios, real stories, real events; socially meaningful — resources designed for students to share; emotionally meaningful — resources for students to challenge themselves and monitor their own progress. Our books are a flexible, multi-use learning resource for whole class use and for individual learning programmes.
Total Words books are concise, creative non-fiction stories. Each book contains clearly marked word counts to motivate and easily track reading progress. Our books are about real-life, meaningful topics, with highlighted keywords to support reading and language skills, ideal for beginner readers, reluctant readers and readers who prefer their reading in small, manageable, content-rich texts.
All of our books are accompanied by activities to practice word recognition, reading comprehension, language development and thinking skills — recalling details, sharing opinions, asking questions — easy to use for teachers and parents.
Reading, Thinking and Sharing Ideas
We support practices of keywords, phonic patterns and text content in the design of each book and through additional pre-teach activities, topic-thinking skills, research and comprehension tasks.
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High interest, concise texts
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Highlighted keywords
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Clearly marked word-totals
Total Words Matter
The amount of reading that each student does in a day matters. Reading skills are learned through practice.
The amount of reading that each student does about a topic matters. Reading five small chunks of text can be far more motivating and effective than reading one large chunk of text, that is why Total Words books come in sets of five different titles around a single topic.
The simple reality is that if we make sure each child reads a whole book by themselves each day, we will immediately increase their direct contact with words. It is more than reading words; it is reading whole books.
Helping students to know how many words they have read can be highly motivating, helping them to understand that the more words that they read each day the more they can enjoy reading.
Written text is made up of approximately 50% high-frequency words. Simply by ensuring that a beginner reader reads 100 words a day, they will read 500 words a week, and, within that text, will automatically practice high-frequency words 250 times. Total Words books maximises the efficiency of a text by repeating keywords throughout each book and by presenting similar vocabulary across sets of five books, all of which relate to the same topic.
More Than Reading
Learn to Read,
Read to Learn
Total Words books give students topic details that nurture their topic knowledge, helping them to remain confident and actively involved in classroom learning.
Total Words books provide students with an easy pathway to accessing topic information and highlight keywords that are related to the topic. Our books can be read in a short time, and a whole class can gain insight into five different aspects of a topic, through the five titles contained within each box.
Students' research skills can be enhanced because they know keywords, know key topic content and know interesting details that they can research further and incorporate into their writing.
Making Reading Meaningful
For some pupils, making reading meaningful needs a more individualised approach. As well as our class sets of books and resources, we offer bespoke, customised stories and individual learning plans that can encourage pupils to see purpose, connect to meaning and achieve success from their reading.
Enhance
Thinking
Skills
Promote
self-motivated
achievement in learning
Students can read whole books in a short time, can see their achievement and can be more motivated learners
Easily track daily and weekly progress