Apple Tree Farm

We’re at the “learning to read” stage with our youngest. He can already recognise some letters – especially “his” letters (from his name). He loves being read to, and “reading” to himself. (I love standing outside his door at night listening to him talking to himself and his teddies retelling and reinterpreting the bedtime stories we’ve just read him.)

One of our favourite learning-to-read series is the Farmyard Tales books by Heather Amery and Stephen Cartwright, published by Usborne. We have a couple of story compilations, as well as individual stories as sticker books (where certain words in the story are represented by pictures, and the sticker with that picture includes the associated missing word), books with jigsaw puzzles for each scene, a book with magnetic pages and characters you can position and move around as you tell the story, alphabet flash card… The list goes on, but we have most of them, and all are dearly beloved by the whole family.

The regular story books are designed to have interest for multiple ages and levels of reading ability, so they remain appealing for a number of years. For non-readers, there’s a “find the duck” game – spotting a small yellow rubber duckie who’s hidden somewhere in each scene; for beginning readers, the sentence at the top of the page is short with simple words for them to read, then the bottom of the page has one or two longer more complicated sentences for a grownup to read; as they improve, they can read both sets of sentences themselves. (Click the Look Inside link on this Amazon page to preview.)

The stories are simple but fun (naughty sheep escaping from fields, unexpected visits from campers and hot-air-balloonists, trips to the market, …), the characters are appealing – I love that Mrs Boot, not Mr Boot, is the farmer – and the illustrations are beautiful with wonderful detail.