Having Fun with BOB

(43 months)

We bought Box One of the BOB books last February.  My plan was to have each of the kiddies sit, and we would learn to read together.  I had these wonderfully, black and white movie visions that they would want to sit down and learn to read.  After all they really love being read to.  In fact, they will huddle in to almost anyone reading (even the mommies that we don't know at Barnes and Noble or at the library- I need to work on stranger danger).  They will sit still, when they want to, for almost an hour and listen to book after book after book.  So of course, I thought that since they just turned three it would be a perfect time for them to start.  Nope!  Neither one of them liked the idea of sounding out words in a book.  They liked doing it during Calendar Time, and they liked working on the BOB book activities, but in book-form, they were not interested.  The last thing I wanted is to discourage them from their love of "reading".  I don't want it to be made into a battle of wills.  If they aren't ready yet, then we'll try again later, and that's just what we did.

Fast forward six months, and we started again with the BOB books.  This time with eager success.  I think this is in large part to two things, one they have been showing increasing signs of reading readiness (moving from pretending to read stories, to tracking their "reading", to making up stories, to wanting to read) and two we started with another version of BOB, Larkin's Little Readers (wilbooks.com) Reading Level: K.  The Little Readers offer a lot, I mean a lot, of support through pictures.  It also allows the child to have almost instant success, which helped inspire my little ones to keep trying.  What's most remarkable is how quickly they are now able to really read the BOB books.  We started set one, book three yesterday and with a little help they were able to read it on their own on the first read through. It's so exciting!