Teaching students how to read is one of the most important tasks in elementary schools. The majority of schools use published basal programs to teach students to read. Several published reviews have indicated that past editions of basal readers did not align with appropriate instruction for beginning level readers. In this study I reviewed five of the top-selling programs for their phonics instruction sequence, levels of decodable text, and readability. Results were then discussed in the context of providing good instruction for beginning stage readers. (Contains 4 tables.)