School Readers

Phoebe's school made the children buy some compulsory readers. I thought the readers are very good because they are targeted at nursery level. The stories are simple yet informative. Here are the first three readers of the series.

The book picks up some high frequency words which are repeated so that children can recognise them after being exposed to them several times. Each book also has a language focus which teaches skills like questioning, prediction, comparison etc. Phoebe is able to read these three books fluently. She recognises some of the words inside but she also uses the picture cues to help herself to guess the other unknown words. I would want her to be able to recognise all the words in the readers without refering to the pictures. Hence, I wrote the high frequency and content words in flash cards and I showed them to Phoebe. Through practice, she is able to recognise more words but I need to keep flashing the cards so that she will internalise the words and not forget them so easily.

Last year, when some of us went for a school workshop, each of us were given a goodies bag with three simple readers. Phoebe loves these three books. She can memorise them because she has read them umpteen times. I'm hoping to find the vendor to purchase more of these readers.

Phoebe's school also made the children purchase Chinese readers. Phoebe again looks at the pictures to tell the story. I doubt she recognises any of the Chinese characters. She has memorised the stories and is able to regurgitate them, though less fluently. Well, at least I'm glad that she's able to identify some of the items in Mandarin.

Learning to read is an on-going process. My hope for Phoebe is that, she will become an independent reader who possesses the joy of reading =)