But if you put the same kind of words into a comic book bubble and accompany them by expressive drawings, suddenly you have got a little story! Silly Lilly in Four Seasons by Agnes RosenstiehlĪnd that was the main focus of this collection of beginner readers – to collect comic books that while being short and simple, would hold some real interest for a child of six. When an author tries to string together some coherent text from a few simple words that a beginning reader can sound out, it is indeed difficult to come up with something better than, “There is a cat. That’s when we discovered that comic books work really great for practising reading! When learning to read, they often feel uninspired by the text, and their attention wanders off.įor my son, we had to pick and choose the early reader books that he would feel interested in.
I think it is a common problem for children, especially for those who have been enjoying books throughout their early childhood. And compared to The Hobbit, the pages of his early readers were definitely falling flat. Some of the books we read aloud, and many of them he listened to as audiobooks. The problem was that, by the ripe age of six, my beginning reader had already fallen in love with such gems of literature as The Wizard of Oz, Henry Huggins, and even The Hobbit. Or the unpredictability of English reading that I was now attempting to explain.
I mean, besides the attention span of a six-year-old when he has to do something he isn’t exactly enjoying. While teaching my son to read this year, I was faced with a problem. Early reader comic books give kids who are just beginning to read an opportunity to step away from workbook texts and enjoy the stories!