One of the things I like best about the Bob Books is how they progress sequentially, introducing different concepts in handy, easy-to-hold books. Lately I’ve been using the My First Bob Books: Pre-Reading Skills with Wilson, our emerging reader. Because he knows his shapes pretty well, we’re now breezing through the first three books (which cover learning simple shapes, finding hidden shapes and matching shapes) and are spending more time on the other three groups (sorting, patterns and sequencing). We’re having fun with each book beyond the text, asking questions, finding hidden objects and playing games.
My First Bob Books are not only intended for you to read to your child (whereas the foundation sets are intended for your child to read to you) but they are full of fun learning games that you can play with your emerging reader. For example, in “Fix It” (book 5) kids are asked to identify certain shapes that will enable the broken toys to get fixed. The illustrations contain additional shapes (triangles on the curtain, a smiley face on the flag), which I asked Wilson to identify and count. In “Get Ready” (book 10) the illustrations are spaced on the page as to give kids clues to what happens next. I turned it into a game by asking Wilson which toys he would play with first, second and last. Wilson loves blocks so we had a lot of fun with “Block Town” (book 7), which introduces simple patterns. I had him repeat all of the shapes in the pattern (“square, rectangle, rectangle, square”) and then we got down on the floor and created our own pattern – using the Bob Books!
My emerging reader has an extremely short attention span so our reading sessions progress at their own pace. Once he gets wiggly or starts throwing books on the floor, it’s time to move onto something else. Still, I can definitely tell that each time we pick up the books, he’s putting into action the concepts that we learned in previous reading sessions. Which is pretty exciting.
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All of the other books (sniff) on the shelf are being ignored. For now. I never imagined that I would have a 2 year-old son who would be able to point out the differences between a mini digger and a giant excavator and a concrete mixer before he could distinguish between the letters A, B or C, but alas, this is where we are at right now. I’ve decided to, ahem, roll with it. After all, learning early literacy skills doesn’t have to happen in any set order.
