I remember reading to my oldest child, first teaching her letters and their sounds, then blending, and finally the milestone of reading consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words. We used to do one “word of the day” on the DC Circulator bus ride to school. I thought of how thrilled she would be if she could read a whole book on her own. I’d found books that were pitched as beginner readers, but they still required more skill than just sounding words, more skill than my little one had despite her obvious interest to take ownership of reading. I needed a book truly at her level, one that was written exclusively using decodable words with no aberration.

I figured it might be useful to create books like what I had in mind. At worst, they might join other phonetically written books and serve as added practice or just another interesting read. As I’m sure many of us parents know, kids churn through books pretty quickly and there’s no end to that appetite. But at best, this could bring something to kids that they’ve never had before — a book they could read on their own, at the earliest possible point in their reading journey.

Thus was born the Sena Cat series! Book 1 took a while, ironing out a story that had some progression but was written exclusively using words that could be sounded out. And, it couldn’t be long — maybe just seven pages, which, for a first-time reader is a lot.

Then came the “niceness” scrub. You could have a sentence with phonetic words like “Dan sat on Ben,” and believe it or not, you’ll find things like this in early-reading kids’ books. But that’s not very nice for poor Ben – he could get hurt 🙂 Kids are impressionable and their first-read book should not introduce or make light of something like this – what if they take example and do this to a classmate? I resolved that the early reader books would be comprised of only kind, positive, supportive and encouraging messages. While I appreciate the value of books the introduce real life and its nuances to kids, I made a choice in this series to keep everything rosy. Thus arose the first book, the introduction of this funny, silly cat that kids could read about.

I figured kids would want another one or two along these lines, written only with decodable words, so that generated the next two books in the series. But, they would each stretch just a bit: Book 2 introduces a word that’s almost fully phonetic but just shy of it: “her.” Book 3 introduces another word like that, “now,” and has words that are phonetic but repeat a consonant (like “ball” or “dinner”).

I am not a teacher, so I can’t claim any pedagogical method to how I chose to introduce new sounds and words as the books progressed in the series. But slowly they build, where any individual book was written so that it used its own scope and the allowances of any book before it — but no more. The series naturally took its own shape, reaching the first mini-milestone at Book 10 which introduces the all-important sight word, “the.” But imagine writing nine books without using the word “the!”

The series will grow from there and I will pump out the books as quickly as I can. Experience continues to show that once a child gets through the one book, they quickly want the next one. It is a delight to see how these books are being enjoyed and catching on. If a kid is happier because of this read, I’d be a happier guy!