Moving on from Early Readers

Making letter pretzels, ca. 2008 (age 2 1/2)

Teachers and parents know that early reading starts prior to letter recognition. Hearing a language spoken repeatedly, being read to, hearing letter sounds and using baby-sign are all appropriate reading activities for infants and toddlers. JillyBoo lives in a print-rich household, stocked with textbooks of all shapes and sizes (mostly extra-large), board books, maps, cookbooks, etc.

One of JillyBoo's early writing samples, Summer 2007 (approx. 20 months)

With me as a mom, JillyBoo couldn't avoid being introduced to phonograms at an early age. "Mama, that's and A!" Me: "Um-hmm...what sounds does it make?" We were thrilled to enroll her in a fab Montessori School that supported her early literacy efforts. She blossomed from an engrossed picture-reader to an actual reader within 3 months of attending. Her first readers were the fantastic BOB books series.

The BOB series are wonderful first readers for many reasons. First, they start off with simple, one-letter phonograms that are easy to read and don't take too much stamina. The books progress to more digrams and more complicated sentence structures, gradually introducing new punctuation, such as quotation marks, commas, and question marks. The books are fun, and have simple illustrations. In many pictures, the illustration itself does not give away the meaning or words on the page, which is helpful in determining if a child is truly reading, or if he/she is just decoding the picture. That said, the text is easy to memorize, so many parents cover the pictures with a piece of folded construction paper to deter kids from memorizing the order of the text.

While I do love BOB books, during our move to Europe this summer, we experienced a period of reading burn out. I couldn't convince or cajole her to read a BOB book, or any other book for that matter. I was having a difficult time finding alternate readers for her at the library. All were too difficult, had funky words, or lacked that gradual increase in difficulty level that I noted in the BOB books.

Our school instituted a new reading series this year, Reading Street, and I was able to take a look at the Kindergarten version of the series. As a teacher, I love this series because it is thorough, addresses many learning styles, integrates "Strategies that Work" and other important reading strategies in one neat, fun, hands-on package. For kinders, two great book series that are included in the Reading Street program stuck out to me.

First, the "Living in a Biome" series from Capstone Press. I used my favorite used bookseller, abebooks.com, to order many of the Reading Street readers, and Living in an Ocean arrived first. Words like ocean and animal can be difficult for an emergent reader, but the authors repeat the words frequently enough for the child to read them independently by the end of the book. The photographs are colorful and enticing, and I love that they are non-fiction readers, but are not dry. I have at least 4 more of the books from this series on order right now.

The other non-fiction reader series that I recommend is the Animal Babies series from Kingfisher Press. These are fun and somewhat easy readers for upper-emergent readers. My 5-year-old needs assistance on some of the words, but for the most part, she can read a few pages a night easily on her own. We aren't reading these in one sitting, as the pages are lengthy, but the text makes kids want to read at least two pages in a row. This book also includes some colorful and ridiculously adorable pics of baby animals, but I appreciate that they aren't all cows and ducks! You can use the books as an anchor lesson for differences in biomes and animal habitats, which is a great cross-curricular tie-in. Other parents agree that these books have a fun format with great illustrations.

Happy reading!