Review and Give-Away: Bob Books!

If you read Chronicle of an Infant Bibliophile regularly, you know that we have been posting about "early readers" often lately, as the Bibliophile's reading has really taken off in the past few months.  Many of you here or in our every day life have asked when he started reading, or how.  While I have no simple answer (other than that he has always loved books and we have always read to him and with him very often), there are a few tools that helped him to make the connection between phonetic sounds to sounding out words to reading full sentences.  One of those tools is the Bob Books series.  Thanks to a generous Nana, we own Bob Books, Set 1: Beginning Readers, Bob Books Set 2: Advancing Beginners, and Bob Books Set 3: Word Families.  We have read through the first two sets fairly often, and it is probably time that we pulled out the third.

So, I was super excited when I was offered the chance to review two new sets of Bob books: Sight Words - Kindergarten and Sight Words - First Grade.

Here is an official description of the book sets:

From the #1 bestselling learn-to-read program come two brand-new sets focused on learning and practicing Sight Words.

Sight Words are words that are recognized by sight rather than sounded out, in order to achieve reading fluency. They are the most frequently used words in the English language, and are often unable to be read phonetically (“was”, “are”, and “out” are examples).  Bob Books Sight Words feature the top Sight Words in two sets – one for kindergarten and one for first grade – in order to allow parents and children to read, learn, and practice easily and enjoyably.

Each Sight Words box includes 10 original books, 30 flashcards, and a parent guide.  Soon your child will be saying “I read the whole book!”®

 For those of you who have never read Bob Books before, here is a sample two-page spread.  The books are small paperbacks with limited color sketches and very simple sentences:

What we thought of them: To my untrained eye, I didn't notice a huge difference in ability level between the kindergarten and first grade levels.  The reading level didn't strike me as overly difficult in either set.  For the most part, the Bibliophile read the words on his own without assistance.  With that said, he's clearly not an average 2 1/2 year old reader.  I would (and often do: see below) recommend any of the Bob Books if your child, regardless of age, is just learning to read or if you'd like to start trying to help them down that path.   The short length is good for keeping children's short attention spans engaged; and for the number of books that come in each set, they are a good value.

We especially loved the addition of the flashcards in these two boxed sets.  We didn't use them as flashcards, per se.  We played with the idea of making sentences.  I spread them out all over the floor and would ask him to pick one of the subject words, verbs, etc. (showing him his choices in each case - he certainly doesn't understand those concepts yet).  He had a great time with it, and I will probably make more cards to supplement the stack and expand our "game."

I feel strongly that the best way to teach a child to read is to teach him to love books, and that to teach him to love books, you should read to him early and often -- board books, picture books, chapter books (if they'll sit still for them), etc.  I don't like to give too much credit to any one type of tool, for fear of minimizing this emphasis on simply reading together often.  However, if you do this, laying the foundation for a lifetime love of reading, then I think Bob Books can play a wonderful role in teaching a child to read.  I credit them with helping the Bibliophile understand the concept of sounding out words and contributing to the realization that he could read an entire book himself.  I have recommended them to at least three different parents in the last month, when asked how the Bibliophile first started reading at such a young age (right AFTER I explain to them that we read with him.  A LOT.)

Give Away!

Thanks to the generosity of Scholastic, Inc., we have a great give-away for TWO of our readers!

Two winners will receive:

• A Bob Books lunchbox
• Copies of Bob Books Sight Words: Kindergarten and Bob Books Sight Words: First Grade

To enter:
1) Leave any comment (make sure your email is included if it is not accessible from your profile).
2) Visit www.scholastic.com/bobbooks and leave a comment here telling me something you learned from the site or something you liked about it.
3) Follow Chronicle of an Infant Bibliophile or subscribe to us in a reader and leave another comment letting me know.


That is three entries per person.  The prize will ship to U.S. addresses only.  Deadline is midnight, EST, on August 16, 2010.

This Give-Away is now closed.  Congratulations to the winner (Chels), who I will be contacting by email.  The winner was chosen using random.org.

Disclosure: We were provided a copy of Bob Books Sight Words: Kindergarten and Bob Books Sight Words: First Grade in order to write this review.  If you buy anything by clicking on the above links, we may earn a small commission through our affiliate relationship with Amazon.com.