It’s another Mother-Talk book tour and we’re proud to announce that T.O.P is one of the few Mother-Talk Star bloggers! (The highest rated bloggers who have first choice of the great books that Mother-Talk represents.) Since reading is one of my favourite things to do I was very excited to hear that. So is teaching reading, which made this tour a perfect fit for me!

This time, it’s a review of the first set of BOB Books, a box set of phonetic readers. Our review set hasn’t arrived yet but luckily I had a friend with the box I was to review and she lent them to me. These are some great books which made their way very quickly into my classroom (I’m an early literacy teacher in “real life”) and will definitely come home again (my own set, of course, when it finally arrives!) when my son’s a little older. Hopefully they’ll be joined by the rest of the box sets too!

There’s so much to love about BOB Books (fun stuff notwithstanding). They’re a lot like the books that I learned with that are now out of print and very hard to find.

When kids are first learning to read, they need books that focus on initial consonant sounds and one or two vowels at a time (short or long, not both, which is why Dick and Jane suck when they’re together)with large print and little illustration to distract from the words. BOB Books does all of this perfectly, and also integrates numbers from 1-10 in their beginner set (but not the number words, thank goodness) which is a nice touch.

As the sets progress, they move through more complex letter combinations with sight words and mixed short vowels, word families (words that all end in the same sound; the -at family would include cat, sat, that, fat, bat etc), compound words and long vowels.

These are exactly the kind of books I will be recommending to the parents of my kindergarten students when they inevitably ask me what they should buy for home reading books to help their child get started on decoding and independent reading.

I didn’t notice at first but these books are from Scholastic and that’s a huge bonus! That’s the company that your child’s teacher will likely send home book order forms from and the company that offers the in-school book fairs. They’re who I buy 99% of my books from and they have great products, great quality and great prices.