To help students better understand their audience of emerging readers, we spent time looking at basal readers and leveled books used in the primary classrooms. The first grade reading series used at Kahakai has 4 levels. GT students reviewed each level noting the progression of skills taught. Students discovered that Level One focused on words using the short and long vowels "a" "i" and "o". Level Two introduced blends, vowels "e" and "u" and focused on learning about capitalization, end punctuation, parts of a book, and endings s, es, ed and ing. Level Three introduced readers to digraphs, more blends, double consonants and quotations. By Level Four, young readers were reading more text, inflectional endings, contractions and compound words.

Once we had an overview of first grade reading skills, GT students went into first grade classrooms to listen to first graders reading their books. Becoming familiar with the skills young children practice to become proficient readers helped GT students with the selection of words for their E-book stories.