Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsPerfect for teaching kids to read!
Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2019
This is my go-to book for teaching beginning readers. It's interesting and gently humorous, and the pictures are charming -- but a lot of books have those qualities. What makes this book (and the other Little Bear books) so great is that the words are almost all common words a reader is likely to encounter often, they're almost all easy words that can be sounded out, and there's a fair amount of repetition with slight variations. Because of this, the child's effort and success in reading one word are likely to pay off in reading that same word or a similar word later on the page or one the next page. The child quickly starts to feel familiar with some words, and consequently more and more confident and optimistic about being able to read. This is especially valuable if the child has fallen behind and is discouraged. I find that after reading one or a few of these books, children are able to progress to well-written books at level 2 such as Frog and Toad.
This is not the case with all so-called "beginner" books. Some of them have charming pictures and only a few words per page but those words are too hard for most beginners to sound out and aren't particularly common words, so having learned that word is of limited use when the child tries to read the next word (which is also often neither easy nor extremely common). Such books are great for adults to read TO kids, and for kids to pretend to read once they've memorized the words, but aren't very helpful for teaching and reinforcing the building blocks of reading. The Little Bear books do just that in an enjoyable way. I'm so grateful for them!
