Short stories and multiple exercises offer scaffolded practice in the most commonly used sound-spelling patterns of long vowels in English. R-controlled vowels and other vowel variations are also taught directly. Students review short vowels, consonant blends, and consonant digraphs in each unit. At the Lake helps students build reading fluency and decoding skills, which foster vocabulary acquisition and comprehension skills.

At the Lake enables ESL teachers of any experience level to teach reading in English to students with limited or interrupted formal education, or to any student who needs to improve spelling, decoding, pronunciation, and reading in English.

A detailed teacher's guide and audio files are available free of charge on the Wayzgoose Press website.