Language Arts

Sixty-one stories including "A Christmas Carol" by Dickens, "At High Mass" By Msgr. Benson, "The Names of Our Lady", "The Sign of the Cross" by John Henry Cardinal Newman, and "The New School" by Joyce Kilmer. Includes study suggestions for each story. A few black and white pictures. Includes a glossary and home reading list.

The Bob Books and subsequent titles (five sets of small reading booklets in all) are sets of very small, stapled booklets with black and white line drawings and colorful covers, which contain very simple stories. They are approximately $15 per set (although I've seen them at Sam's Club and Half-Price books for less). Each set comes in a colorful box with two little cardboard finger puppets and a cardboard puppet theatre. Although the booklets can hold up pretty well through several children (if you keep them from the little ones, since each book is generally read only once), the puppet theatre and finger puppets, and even the box, will probably not survive long in a busy homeschool family. Although I hesitated for quite awhile to purchase these books because I prefer stories with more beautiful pictures and more meaningful text, I have, in the end, found these books to be quite useful tools in teaching and encouraging reading and motivating children through some of the more tedious stages of getting comfortable with reading. They also fill a need. If you look at early readers at the public library, you will be hard pressed to find anything (except perhaps a bit of Dr. Seuss, who I don't care for all that much) that starts out at such a simple level.

This second set was just released and wasn't around when I taught my oldest to read. Although she did fine without it, I thought that the additional practice on this basic level was very helpful for my son (who has just finished this second set). Like the first set, the stories are designed entirely for the purpose of practicing beginning reading skills by introducing sounds in an intelligent order. The stories are very simple and usually quite silly. This set does introduce several two-letter phonograms - "ar" (book 3), "aw" (book 3) "ow" (book 4), "ou" (book 7), "oo" (book 12).

Formerly titled More Bob Books
This series provides practice lots of with two-letter consonant blends (such as "nt", "nd" and "dr"). Book six introduces words with long vowels ending with a silent "e". The books increase in number of pages and number of text lines on each page quite a bit as this particular set progresses. While using this series with my daughter, we started running through the phonogram cards (from The Writing Road to Reading) each day. I introduced (and explained) spelling rules as they came up in the stories from this set.