Indepent Reading

When Bobo first learned to read, it took me quite a while to realize books with lots of pictures distracted her and slowed her down. I got all sorts of early readers from the library, the ones with few words on the page and lots of pictures. I thought she'd breeze through them.

She never read these books as well as I knew she could. When we would do her oral reading from McGuffey's Ecletic Reader, she would zip right along. Give her a fun picture book, however, there was no zipping. Not really any moving actually. "Wait, let me look at the pictures..." she'd say, which lasted the whole reading time.

I decided to try the Happy Little Family books for her pleasure reading instead. Like McGuffey, there were few illustrations and the ones present were simple and in black and white. This worked marvelously, as Bobo was less distracted and focused on the words instead of the pictures.

The Pixie Hollow books are a good fit too right now. The pictures are in color, but they're only every few pages...

Bobo's narration of Vidia and the Fairy Crown:

"Vidia is a great book, and a great mystery too. All the fairies in Pixie Hollow blamed Vidia that she stole the crown. But Vidia actually finds the crown and gives it back to Queen Ree. Vidia almost became the villain but turns out to be a good fairy. When Vidia found the crown, she almost stole it. But Prilla knew what was going to happen, so Vidia gave it back. Vidia and the Fairy Crown is an awesome book. It has ten chapters that are all exciting, you hardly even want to stop. Vidia is always on some sort of goose chase but she's also in some kind of mood."