Even more books for emergent readers!

May 16, 2012Leave a comment

I have been flicking through my collection of children’s books for the last number of days to find the best ones for emergent readers. My study is full of children’s books and the over flow is between my attic and my parent’s house. I think that perhaps I have a small problem… What do you think?!

I really do love this Nick Butterworth series of books for beginner readers. When I saw that they are on sale at 28% off on Book Depository I just knew I had to review them for you! I think that you will like them too. The title is pretty catchy, eh 🙂

Nick Butterworth has produced a gem of a book for young readers or even preschoolers. The illustrations are big and clear. The text is written in a large font size on a separate, uncluttered page with a white background. All of this helps readers to predict ( clear pictures) and read the story for themselves.

Here is a brief synopsis of what this “fantastic Mum can do”!

It doesn’t stop there!

The book contains lots of Dolch words, many of which are constantly repeated throughout the short book such as “and, she ,can”.

You may prefer some other titles from Nick Butterworth’s Series that are more relevant to your child and his/her special people. How about…

Book Depository are selling these titles for just 5.43 Euro each with their usual free worldwide postage. Please click here for a link.

Preschool children would also find this book very accessible and fun. The print is so large that your child could learn to “track” . ” Tracking” is the term that refers to the direction in which we read and write print. In our culture we read from left to right and top to bottom. This is not intuitive for young readers and needs to be taught by explicitly pointing to words as we read. Our eye movements are too subtle to communicate that we are “tracking”. Children also need to learn about the “one to one correspondence” between the spoken and written word. This is that one spoken word ( phoneme) is represented by one written word (grapheme). Ok, enough science for now…

Do you have any recommendations for beginner readers? What is your child’s favourite ? Please leave a comment below and share with us.

Have fun,

Miss Mernagh 🙂

Monster Digraph Fun!

April 3, 2011September 2, 2011Leave a comment

I made this cute sheet to use during my 5 a-day reading lesson. You can read more about this on my Fruity Labels for Daily Readers post. It encourages children to hunt for and recognise digraphs in books that they are reading and is a good compliment to my Dainty Digraph Quilt activity. I ask my class to read their book twice. The first time is for the enjoyment of the story and the second time is to find as many Monster digraph words as they can and to write these words into the correct column. I made a double sided sheet for my class which meant that they were looking for lots of different digraphs. You could hand out just one sheet and have them complete that. Then you could save the other sheet for another day ;). Click here to download both sheets.

Clipart by DJInkers

This sheet would be useful at home or in school . The digraphs used as from the Jolly Phonics programme , but would compliment any phonics instruction. It would be a great “busy bee” activity sheet for earlier finishers too!

I have already used this sheet with my class and it got a thumbs up for cuteness! I hope that you have the same happy response 🙂

Have fun,

Miss Mernagh 🙂

How do I pick a book that my child can read?

February 16, 2011September 2, 20115 Comments

How hard should the book be?How do I know if I am buying the right one? I am probably asked this question weekly by parents.

Picking a book to read to your child is pretty easy, finding one that he/she can read independently is a little trickier. Often parents think that should be stretching their child with a “hard book”. I get complaints about school “take home books” being “too easy”!

Children will learn sight words from regular reading. No one is disputing this. It is recommended that children read for up to 10minutes daily.If the books that they read are always challenging it may actually turn them off reading. Reading at home should mostly be about “reading for fun”.

You might actually be surprised by the rule below. Only 2/10 unfamilar words per page is considered the perfect level for both learning and enjoyment.

The 5 Finger Rule

Open a page in the middle of the book and read it using the 5 finger rule: