This study examined the effectiveness of a little book curriculum in facilitating the independent word-solving skills of first-grade readers. The curriculum was based on a theoretical model that identified two critical dimensions of text-based support for beginning readers: linguistic content and cognitive load. The 15-week little book intervention was conducted in four first-grade classrooms of an inner-city school in a large urban district. Two classes were assigned to the intervention group, and two were assigned to the comparison group. The intervention group read from little books leveled according to features of linguistic content and cognitive load. The comparison group read from basal literature texts. Word lists and graded passages from the Qualitative Reading Inventory (QRI) served as the pre- and post-test measures. ANCOVA and chi-square analyses showed that children in the intervention group performed at significantly higher levels on the post-tests than their counterparts in the comparison group. These results applied equally to the word lists and the passage reading tasks and with children at all reading levels high, average, and struggling.