tara recommends Brand New Readers

Summer is quickly drawing to a close and that puts one thing on my mind – school.  I have had many years of having the kids all to myself, but, soon my five-year-old will be off to new adventures in the classroom – and not wanting to send her unprepared, we have amped up our reading endeavors. 

There seems to be a gap between learning your letters and diving into the early reader books that I remember from my childhood (Frog and Toad, Danny the Dinosaur, etc.).  It can just be painful when it is a struggle to sound out every word on the page and there is so much text.  Luckily, this summer we found a solution.

The Brand New Readers are small, thin paperback books that seem unsubstantial at first glance, but they serve their purpose very well.  Each box contains 10 different books, as well as a chart and stickers to map progress (which I have to admit, we have never used, but they look like they may be useful). 

I would not expect any genius story lines or witty dialogue, but the great thing about these books is their somewhat predictable text (the pictures tell the story) and with the minimal word count, they don’t require nearly the attention span of the longer early readers.  As an added bonus, they are also short enough to read to a busy Daddy!

After burning through almost 3 boxes, now my daughter has moved on to the harder and more word-heavy easy readers.  Luckily, now she is much more confident and has more patience to read the longer sentences!