homegrownbooksnyc.com
Home Grown Books are for emergent readers, little ones that are ready to start learning how the magic of words work. This company offers books and parenting resources to make this learning fun and effective. I am glad to have the change to review them with my own little ones and share how our adventure has gone!
For Smilie Baby and Storm Baby ages 4 and 6 I picked out the Environmental Set because we had not in our 15 years of parenting seen a set like it. So many early readers have cartoon characters and art work that distracting and frankly a lot of it just isn’t very well done. That though is not the case for these books, they are paper cut pictures that are clear to understand, shapes kids known, and are beautiful. I loved how the basic elements are included in this 7 book set.
Beyond my opinion though as a mother, it has been clear how much the kids love these books. They have read them all with me, with each other, by themselves, and the books get picked up to play with time and again. If one child is reading one, soon I have three children reading them, and sometimes I admit having a hard time sharing. I often here “you read that one twice already today!”
The books come with a box making it easy to pick them up and put them away to play with again another day!
The Parent Resource area shows parents how to go on a picture walk with their children before trying to work on reading the book. I hadn’t thought of doing that before and it really makes a lot of sense. Often when reading a book for the first time with the kids they spend a lot of time looking at the pictures and not trying to focus on the words. Why wouldn’t they want to look at the pictures? The resource area of the site has short videos to help show parents how to guide children.
One thing about the videos I didn’t like though was how one of the helpers kept moving the child’s finger over the book when it was not the child’s dominant hand it looked uncomfortable for the child, in my opinion. I would suggest helping the child follow along with their finger on their dominant hand. When my little ones don’t use their finger to follow along they sometimes add words, this is specially true for our 6 year old!
While our 4 year old is a very good reader (she taught herself I swear it…) she still learned a few words from this set! Our 8 year old son learned a few words too! Both of them like helping their 6 year old sister learn to read with these books. While we homeschool we believe that play is the best way to learn and these books are more play than “work” like some other books can be for this age group and task.
Storm Baby (6) has a very favorite page she loves to show people. It really makes her laugh I think because she could imagine it happening in our own garden and yard as the kids do leave toys outside to later find the toys have attracted wildlife!
This is the page she loves:
To see these books and many more for beginning readers please check out http://homegrownbooksnyc.com/ and follow their facebook page to keep up with all their new books coming out!
