Early readers – good ones, bad ones, thin ones, fat ones
When my daughter was first starting to read, I bought a bunch of different kinds of early readers, some because of recommendations, others because they included specific characters that the kids really liked. There are many different early reader series’ and although each series may use ”Levels 1, 2, 3, 4,” the levels are not equivalent from series to series.
Here are a couple that worked really well for us. The Biscuit books by Alyssa Capucilli in the “I Can Read – Shared – My first reading” series were the best that I found for the kids’ very first efforts. The reason they work so well is that the vocabulary used in the book is very small, and the phrases repeat on every page (for example: Biscuit wants to play, Biscuit wants a drink, Biscuit wants a hug, etc.). There are only one or two sentences on each page, and the pictures are very clear and simple, so you can use the pictures to decipher the words in context.
The Dr. Seuss Beginner Books “I can read it all by myself” are a really good second step – they are rhythmical, they also use a limited vocabulary and lots of repeating words, and they are really fun. They’ve been around for a long time, but they still work beautifully. Some titles include Go Dog Go, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, Hop on Pop. These have a lot more words and more pages than the “I can read” series (60+ pages vs. 24 pages), so you may want to alternate pages – parent reads one, kid reads one – or have the child read the first few pages and let the parent finish.
As the child learns some sight words, the “I can read” series has some good longer books as well. I found that some of the other early reader series’, particularly the DK Readers, were not good at all for early reading. It was really misleading – I bought a few, like Spiderman, Ironman, Star Wars, etc., thinking that my son would really like them. And he does, if I read them. The DK Reader level 2 is probably equivalent to the “I can read” series level 4 or even higher. The pictures are great, and my son loves to look at them, but the text is so full of jargon and complicated acronyms (Hobgoblin, Scorpion, C3PO, Millenium Falcon, etc., are really not words that early readers can sound out successfully) that there’s no way a 5-year old could decode it on his/her 3rd, 4th, 5th try at reading. Further, there are rarely repeating words, and the pictures only give clues as to the characters, not the action. The only thing these books are good for is for a pre-reader to have a good time flipping through the color pictures. Once they are good enough to actually decode the words, they’ll be ready for a more sophisticated story. I found the Random House Step-into-reading series to be very similar to the DK readers, although perhaps marginally better as far as repeating vocabulary throughout the text.
On the other hand, DK has a great selection of non-fiction kids books – science and history-related – including a few that are early readers. They also have a big selection of abridged classics that come with CDs, and those have been a big hit with my son. So I’m not complaining about all of the DK books, just the ones that they market as early readers but really aren’t.
The last series I want to mention is the Nick Jr. Ready to Read series that features Dora the explorer and Diego. They also have some My Little Pony titles, and probably others as well. This series was recommended to me by another mom whose kids were really into these characters, and they loved these books. These books use pictures in the text to depict specific words such as characters or objects. The goal is presumably to give kids practice with the short words, and to make the longer words easier by letting them “read the picture.” They didn’t really work with my daughter. I think the pictures throughout the text were distracting, and again, they didn’t have enough repeating vocabulary.
One thing to keep in mind is that the usefulness of early reader books is really limited. It is not worth the money to acquire a large library of early readers, except for the Dr. Seuss beginner books, which you can read to your kids from the time they are babies. When you are reading to your kids, the goal is to read great fairy tales and stories that use a rich vocabulary, beautiful picture books to spark their imagination, and rhythmical, musical, fun sing-along books.
Early readers are specifically a jumping-off point for recognizing sight words and first decoding efforts. Buy a few, and get the rest from the library!
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Great suggestions. I personally think the books with the pictures in the text are hard to read for me much less the kids. Cpt. Evil likes to “say the picture” from time to time but other than learning that the pictures signify words in a particular order (something I think he already knows at ~3), I’m not seeing much benefit.