My First Phonics Book

Rating:
Summary: Good for Kindergarteners and older learning to read
Review: Mistakenly labeled for the 0 - 3 aged child, this book is NOT a picture book, and NOT for children under age 5. I'm going to use this book to supplement/challenge my emergent reader daughter who is in Kindergarten and an "older" age 5 (she'll be 6 in February). My daughter is at the reading stage where the lightbulb is going off: she is stringing sounds together and "reading" words like Fred, red, Ted etc. (she also knows many words by sight learned from school, eg. colors, months, classmates' names, and the high frequency words: a, the, is, that, you, of, in, and, it, too, when, then, etc.) In the next 2 to 6 months, she'll be able to read the pages in My First Phonics Book that show the different spellings of words that sound the same (homonymns). I expect this, because last year when my 6 year old nephew (who turns 7 this month) started reading, the time elapsed from "barely reading" to "really reading" was very short, about a month -- it was incredible. If your child likes to practice his/her reading, then My First Phonics Book should be helpful as your emerging reader advances to more challenging words/books.

Rating:
Summary: Great PRONOUNCIATION guide
Review: Someone did make a mistake on the age for this book. It is DEFINITELY for children who are starting to read AND spell. This book goes through ALL the spellings of sounds of letters in alphabetical order. For example, one of the sounds is "ee" as in "street". The book also lists "ea" as in "treat", "e" as in "me", and others. It does have pictures of items, but that helps the child to distinguish which way to say the word. It is not meant to be a reading teacher, but it is a fantastic guide on pronouncing words and spelling variations. Many letter combinations have more than 1 way to pronounce them. For example, "ea" can be "treat" or "bread". My 7 year old daughter received this book when she was 5. She hated to read at that point and was a bit too young. We picked it up again 6-months later and she didn't want to stop. It has helped her reading and spelling tremendously.

Rating:
Summary: Works for a variety of ages
Review: This book will work for a whole range of ages, if you use it correctly. For the younger child, use it as a picture book and just have fun identifying all the items. At really early ages you might do better to get the ABC or Word book in the board format, but this one will also serve the same purpose if you keep the pages out of little hands!

Once your child starts learning letters and their sounds, stick to the pages in this book that cover those sounds. Obviously some children begin that process sooner than others, but waiting until kindergarten should not be necessary for most.

For the older child, the pages with the blended sounds will be useful.

All of these instructions are included in the front of the book, so I'm a bit mystified by the negative comments that don't take the various ways of using the book into account. My daughter is 2-1/2, and we're enjoying the book. We aren't using the blended sounds yet; we're just focusing on the basic letter sounds right now. I don't see any problem with the assigned age range.