Category Archives: Print Awareness

“Press Here” for fun!

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My dear friend’s daughter, Nora, turned one this month, and as a librarian, writer, and ardent-bordering-on-obsessive fan of children’s literature, I felt it my duty to include a book in her birthday bag o’ swag. Which book to choose? Press Here by Herve Tullet. Deceptively simple, it consists of dots and directions on what to do with them. Press the yellow dot and turn the page. Now there are two dots. Press the yellow dot again, and on the next page, now there are three dots. Tilt the book to the left, and on the next page, the dots seem to have slid to the left edge. Clap your hands to make the dots big, bigger, bigger. It is what electronic books wish they could be: it is interactive, delightful,  and requires no batteries.

Considering that I had to pry Press Here from the hands of my 12- and 10-year-old children to put it in Nora’s gift bag, I can honestly say it’s not just for the littlest ones. My kids are no strangers to electronic games and they logically understand the way paper books work, but both of them followed all the instructions on the pages, like shaking the book to make the dots “move”.  For toddlers, this book is magical. For kids who are building their reading skills, the simple text is engaging enough to read again, again, again. Press Here and see what happens!

Go Bananas!

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Want a book that every kid in your class can read with expression and enjoyment? Try Ed Vere’s nearly wordless picture book, Banana! I love using wordless and nearly wordless books with young readers. (If you want the myriad of reasons why wordless books are great for building narrative skills, fluency, top-down processing, etc., check out this article by the Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement or this one from Education Week.) The facial expressions on the two monkeys are so engaging, and the text is limited to two words: banana and please with either question marks or exclamation points. Read it aloud once to your little ones, and they’ll be begging to read it on their own.  Use it as a lesson on punctuation and how it changes the way we read words on the page. Take two monkey puppets or make monkey masks and let the kids act out the story – even better if you bring in real bananas!

Dogs Don’t Brush Their Teeth

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Dogs Don’t Brush Their Teeth by Diane deGroat and Shelley Rotner is the perfect beginning reader book. The text on each page is simple: “Dogs do” or “Dogs don’t”. The pictures are photos that have been digitally manipulated to show what dogs do (like howl at the moon) and what dogs don’t do (like play an electric guitar in a rock band). Your little ones will be howling with laughter over the funny photos, and with the simple words, they’ll be successful readers the first time they pick the book up.

We extended this book in two different ways. With our younger listeners, we had them decorate dog masks and put them on. Then we asked them to show us with their bodies what a dog can do (like nudge a ball on the floor) and what a dog can’t do (like toss and catch the ball in their hands). For a writing activity, students glued die-cuts of dogs and other objects and wrote or dictated sentences in a simple chart to show “Dogs Do” and “Dogs Don’t”.  Nature Smart animal lovers and your Body Smart movers-and-shakers will love this book!

“One Boy”

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With cool cut-outs on the pages, One Boy by Laura Vaccaro Seeger shows how one word can be found within another word. This counting book starts with the words “One boy” (who we see through a cut-out square on the next page.) Turn the page, and the square hole is now aligned over the word “one” to show that it’s part of the word “alone”. I made index cards of each word in the word pairs where one word shows through to be part of the other word (room and brooms, etc.)  After reading One Boy to kindergartners, I gave each student a card with a word and asked them to find their “word building buddy”. Even students who were still working on letter identification could hold a card next to another to see how the letter shapes matched up. Once students had found their word building buddy, we displayed the cards next to each other and asked for a class vote of thumbs up or down on whether or not a match had been made. A counting book that also helps teach print awareness? One Boy is one good book!