Teens At The Reef

Do you ever wonder how to teach students when to use ee or ea or 'e consonant e' (e-e) when spelling words or how to differentiate between homophones while spelling, e.g., feet vs. feat, meet vs. meat vs. mete? This book helps students who struggle with spelling confusing long vowel spelling patterns to learn spellings by associating focus words to a fun storyline.

Teens At The Reef is a story of three teens spending a weekend with Nan by the bay. A reef dive turns from fun to purpose when they spot plastic rubbish and free a fish from a tangle of fishing line. Back at school, their speech on reef care wins support and inspires action.

It is the second book in the Story Spellers Collection: Long Vowel Team Series. This decodable story highlights 102 high-utility words that use the grapheme “ee” to spell the long /ē/ sound. This book supports students who struggle to identify the correct spelling pattern, ‘ee’, for words with the long /ē/ sound by linking focus words to a fun storyline.

The text has been carefully written to ensure that words with the long /ē/ sound using spelling patterns other than ‘ee’ (such as ‘e’, ‘e-e’, ‘ea’, ‘ie’, or ‘ei’) are not included anywhere in the text. This helps avoid confusion while students become familiar with the focus words in the story. It is a simple and effective way to teach students who struggle with spelling to differentiate between homophones and choose the correct spelling patterns when spelling, e.g., leek vs. leak, creek vs. creak.

The books in the Story Spellers collection have been developed to support orthographic mapping of focus words. Each book in the Long Vowel Team Series focuses on one or two related long-vowel team spellings and includes multiple target words spelled with the same pattern that school-aged learners will encounter when reading and spelling.

Students with learning difficulties who struggle to differentiate multiple spelling patterns for long vowels will benefit from this book. The intention is for children to associate the focus words with the story and subsequently become fluent in encoding and decoding those words.

Each book in this collection comes with educator resources to use alongside the story, reinforcing the spelling patterns covered. With lively illustrations, engaging animal characters, and high-utility words woven naturally into the tale, children practise focus words successfully, build fluency, and gain confidence as spellers.