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Literacy Unlocked: How to Implement the Science of Reading with Young Learners
The latest research and most effective teaching tools for better early literacy instruction
Literacy Unlocked explores the pivotal role of early literacy instruction in shaping a child's reading development and overall academic success. Shifting the focus from reactive intervention to a proactive approach that addresses problems before they arise, this book equips readers with research-backed insights and practical, accessible strategies to implement the science of reading to ensure future generations excel in literacy. Each chapter includes a link leading readers to supplementary online materials that can be utilized in instruction. Written by Amie Burkholder, K-5 literacy coach and CEO of Literacy Edventures, a popular early literacy learning platform, this book explores ideas
The brain science of reading, with information on brain plasticity and the roles of the frontal, occipital-temporal, and parietal-temporal regions The disconnect in learning phonemic awareness and phonics separately, and why and how to address it as instructors Prerequisites for effective handwriting instruction, such as fine motor skills, pencil grip and posture, and understanding writing lines The importance of predictable routines in literacy instruction to help alleviate excessive student cognitive load, including the use of decodable texts Cutting to the crux of better literacy instruction in simple language that anyone can understand, Literacy Unlocked is an essential resource for K-5 teachers, administrators, instructional assistants, reading specialists, and literacy coaches.
Literacy Unlocked explores the pivotal role of early literacy instruction in shaping a child's reading development and overall academic success. Shifting the focus from reactive intervention to a proactive approach that addresses problems before they arise, this book equips readers with research-backed insights and practical, accessible strategies to implement the science of reading to ensure future generations excel in literacy. Each chapter includes a link leading readers to supplementary online materials that can be utilized in instruction. Written by Amie Burkholder, K-5 literacy coach and CEO of Literacy Edventures, a popular early literacy learning platform, this book explores ideas
The brain science of reading, with information on brain plasticity and the roles of the frontal, occipital-temporal, and parietal-temporal regions The disconnect in learning phonemic awareness and phonics separately, and why and how to address it as instructors Prerequisites for effective handwriting instruction, such as fine motor skills, pencil grip and posture, and understanding writing lines The importance of predictable routines in literacy instruction to help alleviate excessive student cognitive load, including the use of decodable texts Cutting to the crux of better literacy instruction in simple language that anyone can understand, Literacy Unlocked is an essential resource for K-5 teachers, administrators, instructional assistants, reading specialists, and literacy coaches.
272 pages, Paperback
Published June 10, 2025
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February 14, 2026
I actually liked this a fair amount, more than my 3-stars might imply, but the relatively low rating is because I'm not entirely sure who -- besides me, just a regular parent with kids learning to read, that is -- this book is actually for.
It isn't especially obvious from the title, cover, or back cover but this book is basically "how to create your own Foundation to Year 2 literacy curriculum based on our understanding of the Science of Reading circa 2025".
Except...who does that? The text is addressed towards teachers but what teacher is doing that? An individual teacher can't really do it. Not only do you have state-wide laws about mandating curricula align to Common Core and/or the Science of Reading but even if an individual teacher wanted to go cowboy and make their own the book itself points out this isn't possible because you need to align the curriculum across grade levels. If the Foundation teacher doesn't teach the "floss rule" then the Year 1 teacher needs to ensure it is on her curriculum. I'm not an educator but surely a reading curriculum is going to be designed/mandated at the school or even district level?
And even if an individual educator -- perhaps at a private school? or as a literacy tutor? or a parent homeschooling? -- were inclined to make their own curriculum based on this book ... this doesn't really provide enough detail to actually do so. It gives you perhaps 80% of a head start but as we all know the last 20% takes 80% of the time.
The biggest shortcoming is there is no scope & sequence. Kind of fair enough because this is a book about how to build a curriculum & lesson plan and not just a curriculum & lesson plan itself. The author notes there is no scientifically agreed upon "best" scope & sequence so different educators and publishers take the same general approach (most important concepts first, edge cases later on) but the details differ. The author tells us that
When you're done with this book you don't have a scope & sequence. Perhaps you kinda, sorta have the tools to start building one.
But that's a lot of work! Not an insurmountable amount. At some level you "just" need to create a list of all the concepts of decoding (which the book does contain, though I haven't double checked whether it is actually exhaustive enough to build your own scope & sequence) and then create a plan for in what order you teach things. Do you teach /m/ before /a/? /s/ before /i/? "-ck" is /k/ before or after the "floss rule"? In what order do you teach the "vowel teams" (e.g. the "ai" in "rain" making its own weird sound different from /a/ or /i/) and when?
How many days do you spend on each one anyway? Do you introduce /s/, /a/, /t/ in a single day? Or do you introduce one a day? When you introduce "silent e" (as in "cape" or "bike") is that a 1-day or 2-day or 5-day activity?
You can make educated guesses about many of these but you really need to actually try teaching it once (or more!) and then make changes based on that.
And then there's all the supplementary stuff. The author includes lots of suggested activities, which are all fine and good. She talks about word chains and decodable texts. But to make an actually usable plan you need to generate, what, 500+ word chains (1 for each day of instruction, across 3 years) and 500+ decodable texts.
Not to mention you need to cross-check everything. Is your decodable text for day 78 using this week's new heart word? Is it also using last week's heart word to help reinforce learning? Is it using the CVC-e pattern from two weeks ago to help reinforce that? Has one of your "temporarily irregular" heart words now become regular because students have been taught a new pattern? Don't forget to go back and do some explicit instruction on that!
None of this is rocket science exactly. But (as she makes clear in Tables 8.2 and 8.4 on decodable texts) to do this reasonably well you need a spreadsheet to track all of this stuff. And it seems like it is would just be kind of a grind to build this all yourself from scratch?
Especially when...there are existing products that you can just buy that do all of this for you using the same principles and concepts and Science of Reading even. Admittedly most of them are targeted at an entire district buying the program. But even there you have options. My kids' school uses Playberry which, from what I can tell, uses all the same concepts as this book, and they offer a "Lone Ranger" pricing tier for individual educators. The UFLI Foundations book is $70 and gives you 3 years worth of detailed lesson plans, word chains, scope & sequence, decodable texts, and so on. This is probably the best "one stop option" for people who aren't bought into a bigger district-wide ecosystem.
(Heck, the author sells her own complete literacy curriculum for $220, which she does an admirable job of not spruiking in this book.)
There is just really no world in which trying to build all of this yourself is a better idea than spending $220 or $70 or even $500 unless you're, I dunno, a literacy teacher in rural Nigeria and $220 is an insurmountable amount of money. (Though I have a feeling if you were actually a literacy teacher in rural Nigeria and emailed the author, she would give you her literacy curriculum for a low price or even free because she seems passionate about teaching kids to read.)
I don't think very many people would be better off trying to build their own early literacy curriculum, especially when lots of people have spent a lot of effort building good ones.
It probably seems like I've spent the entire review saying this book is terrible and nobody should buy it...but remember I started out saying I really liked it! After listing all the things I think it isn't good for what do I think it is actually good for?
Well, there are a lot of good literacy curricula out there...but also some mediocre ones and some bad ones. This book provides enough scaffolding that you can evaluate them. If you're using a curriculum that doesn't seem to mention vowel teams or that doesn't foreground student writing ... this book helps you notice and also gives you the information to know why that's problematic.
So it is pretty excellent as a "curriculum evaluation toolkit". And it also does a much better job of explaining the underlying science and "why" than most curricula do. Admittedly they are targeted at busy teachers who want to know just to start being effective in the classroom. But this goes beyond that. You get more than "research says that memorising high-frequency words isn't so great" and get a discussion of Ehri's 2014 paper on orthographic mapping in the acquisition of sight word reading. There is a memorable passage on the importance of selecting good "exemplar" words for early phonemes. Don't pick "elephant" for /e/ because the /l/ overwhelms the /e/; there are better options out there!
So....I think this is a thoughtful book, full of current research, detailed guidance on everything from articulation to the floss-rule, that I absolutely do not regret reading. But it isn't actually a full curriculum and lesson plan so I'm not really sure who -- other than a handful of extremely weird parents like myself or people sitting on school- or district-wide curriculum evaluation panels -- is really going to benefit from it all?
It isn't especially obvious from the title, cover, or back cover but this book is basically "how to create your own Foundation to Year 2 literacy curriculum based on our understanding of the Science of Reading circa 2025".
Except...who does that? The text is addressed towards teachers but what teacher is doing that? An individual teacher can't really do it. Not only do you have state-wide laws about mandating curricula align to Common Core and/or the Science of Reading but even if an individual teacher wanted to go cowboy and make their own the book itself points out this isn't possible because you need to align the curriculum across grade levels. If the Foundation teacher doesn't teach the "floss rule" then the Year 1 teacher needs to ensure it is on her curriculum. I'm not an educator but surely a reading curriculum is going to be designed/mandated at the school or even district level?
And even if an individual educator -- perhaps at a private school? or as a literacy tutor? or a parent homeschooling? -- were inclined to make their own curriculum based on this book ... this doesn't really provide enough detail to actually do so. It gives you perhaps 80% of a head start but as we all know the last 20% takes 80% of the time.
The biggest shortcoming is there is no scope & sequence. Kind of fair enough because this is a book about how to build a curriculum & lesson plan and not just a curriculum & lesson plan itself. The author notes there is no scientifically agreed upon "best" scope & sequence so different educators and publishers take the same general approach (most important concepts first, edge cases later on) but the details differ. The author tells us that
a scope and sequence are essential for providing students with a structured and systematic phonics education. It is the starting point. We cannot begin phonics instruction without this critical road map to guide us.
When you're done with this book you don't have a scope & sequence. Perhaps you kinda, sorta have the tools to start building one.
But that's a lot of work! Not an insurmountable amount. At some level you "just" need to create a list of all the concepts of decoding (which the book does contain, though I haven't double checked whether it is actually exhaustive enough to build your own scope & sequence) and then create a plan for in what order you teach things. Do you teach /m/ before /a/? /s/ before /i/? "-ck" is /k/ before or after the "floss rule"? In what order do you teach the "vowel teams" (e.g. the "ai" in "rain" making its own weird sound different from /a/ or /i/) and when?
How many days do you spend on each one anyway? Do you introduce /s/, /a/, /t/ in a single day? Or do you introduce one a day? When you introduce "silent e" (as in "cape" or "bike") is that a 1-day or 2-day or 5-day activity?
You can make educated guesses about many of these but you really need to actually try teaching it once (or more!) and then make changes based on that.
And then there's all the supplementary stuff. The author includes lots of suggested activities, which are all fine and good. She talks about word chains and decodable texts. But to make an actually usable plan you need to generate, what, 500+ word chains (1 for each day of instruction, across 3 years) and 500+ decodable texts.
Not to mention you need to cross-check everything. Is your decodable text for day 78 using this week's new heart word? Is it also using last week's heart word to help reinforce learning? Is it using the CVC-e pattern from two weeks ago to help reinforce that? Has one of your "temporarily irregular" heart words now become regular because students have been taught a new pattern? Don't forget to go back and do some explicit instruction on that!
None of this is rocket science exactly. But (as she makes clear in Tables 8.2 and 8.4 on decodable texts) to do this reasonably well you need a spreadsheet to track all of this stuff. And it seems like it is would just be kind of a grind to build this all yourself from scratch?
Especially when...there are existing products that you can just buy that do all of this for you using the same principles and concepts and Science of Reading even. Admittedly most of them are targeted at an entire district buying the program. But even there you have options. My kids' school uses Playberry which, from what I can tell, uses all the same concepts as this book, and they offer a "Lone Ranger" pricing tier for individual educators. The UFLI Foundations book is $70 and gives you 3 years worth of detailed lesson plans, word chains, scope & sequence, decodable texts, and so on. This is probably the best "one stop option" for people who aren't bought into a bigger district-wide ecosystem.
(Heck, the author sells her own complete literacy curriculum for $220, which she does an admirable job of not spruiking in this book.)
There is just really no world in which trying to build all of this yourself is a better idea than spending $220 or $70 or even $500 unless you're, I dunno, a literacy teacher in rural Nigeria and $220 is an insurmountable amount of money. (Though I have a feeling if you were actually a literacy teacher in rural Nigeria and emailed the author, she would give you her literacy curriculum for a low price or even free because she seems passionate about teaching kids to read.)
I don't think very many people would be better off trying to build their own early literacy curriculum, especially when lots of people have spent a lot of effort building good ones.
It probably seems like I've spent the entire review saying this book is terrible and nobody should buy it...but remember I started out saying I really liked it! After listing all the things I think it isn't good for what do I think it is actually good for?
Well, there are a lot of good literacy curricula out there...but also some mediocre ones and some bad ones. This book provides enough scaffolding that you can evaluate them. If you're using a curriculum that doesn't seem to mention vowel teams or that doesn't foreground student writing ... this book helps you notice and also gives you the information to know why that's problematic.
So it is pretty excellent as a "curriculum evaluation toolkit". And it also does a much better job of explaining the underlying science and "why" than most curricula do. Admittedly they are targeted at busy teachers who want to know just to start being effective in the classroom. But this goes beyond that. You get more than "research says that memorising high-frequency words isn't so great" and get a discussion of Ehri's 2014 paper on orthographic mapping in the acquisition of sight word reading. There is a memorable passage on the importance of selecting good "exemplar" words for early phonemes. Don't pick "elephant" for /e/ because the /l/ overwhelms the /e/; there are better options out there!
So....I think this is a thoughtful book, full of current research, detailed guidance on everything from articulation to the floss-rule, that I absolutely do not regret reading. But it isn't actually a full curriculum and lesson plan so I'm not really sure who -- other than a handful of extremely weird parents like myself or people sitting on school- or district-wide curriculum evaluation panels -- is really going to benefit from it all?
February 15, 2026
This book is written so well with easy to understand language. Amy takes important, complicated topics and makes them easy to understand.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews