By Carolyn Wild
Wild Acres Books, 2023
Picture Book, 30 Pages, Ages 3-6
Big Dogs Little Dogs: On The Farm is an early reader book that emphasizes the importance of sight words and frequency words. Since 50% of all text is composed of these types of words, learning them in context at an early age supports good reading skills into the future. Often this type of book prominently features repetitive text so it’s imperative to find ways to make the pages interesting for those learning to read.
A good series of books for early readers and for anyone learning English as a second language!
For that reason this book is simple in text but the author does some fun things to make it interesting. Not only does she change the size and color of the text but the photo images portray the size difference and each page emphasizes the high frequency sight words.
In the front of the book as an informational box with word count, reading level, LEXILE RANGE, etc. The back of the book has a list of the sight words featured throughout the book as well as a picture dictionary. Of particular interest is the “Learning to Read Guidelines” and a link to free worksheets as well. There is also some information about the Komondor dogs featured throughout the book.
I like this book because it’s simple, straight-forward, and accomplishes the goal of teaching with excellence. I did deduct half a star as the text boxes were big enough to make the text and images larger. However, I would highly recommend this book for early learners, as a teaching tool in classrooms, and would also recommend it for anybody trying to learn English as a second language.
The author, Carolyn Wild, has notified this reviewer that she will be making the recommended changes to this book! We’re anxious to see how the book presents when these changes are made!
Big Dogs Little Dogs: On The Farm receives 4.5 stars from this reviewer.