Portfolio > The Job, Illustration

The Job–A young man whose father and grandfather are cops has to check his own impulses when police brutality strikes close to home.

“Just the Beginning” is an anthology comprised of 6 decodable readers for grades 6-12 written by Leslie Vaughn. The readers are individually titled as follows: I AM A MAN, The Job, You Can I Can’t, Let Them Tell, Glad and Mad, and Pam and Gus Run.

The stories center civil rights, slavery, and social justice issues and presents them to middle to high school students with early elementary level reading skills for the purpose of supporting their literacy, among other academic and developmental goals. Each story is highly decodable, focused on short vowel vocabulary. Multisyllabic words are predivided and limited to closed, open, and -er syllables.