Animals Phonics Field Set (LEGO Nonfiction): A LEGO Journey within the Actual World

Great purchase
Phonics, legos, and animal facts. What more does a kid and mother need.

Advanced Phonics Skills
I purchased these books from a local bookshop, not from Amazon, but I decided to write a review so that would-be buyers can have a better idea of the content of these books. First, the books are organized by vowel sound, but you’re not going to find text such as ‘The frog hops and hops on the log’. These books go beyond the level of one-syllable words, so, for example, in the short a books, animals with one-syllable names such as ‘bat’ and ‘yak’ are featured, but also animals with multi-syllable names including ‘panda’ and ‘anaconda’. Additionally, even though each animal will have a particular vowel sound in its name, the words in the related text will include different vowels sounds, so when reading about parrots, a child will encounter words such as ‘squawk’ and ‘flock’: ‘Squawk, squawk! It’s a flock of parrots chatting in the tree tops.’ (Each book features about seven animals, each with a two-page spread, a few sentences of text and a picture on one side, picture on the other side.)In my opinion, as far as being able to read the books independently or with minimal help goes, these books are best for young readers who have covered the ‘basic code’ of English i.e. who know all the most common spelling-sound relationships and are starting on longer words, particularly if they are learning how to break such words into syllables (par-rot, chat-ting, mim-ic, bob-cat, chip-munk, bee-tle, fan-tas-tic, ro-tate, road-run-ner). The words in the books are very controlled and phonetic. After looking through, I don’t think I saw any irregularly spelled words except high-frequency ones (‘many’, ‘have’, ‘some’ etc). These books would be good for learners who are past ‘the cat on the mat’ and ‘the sheep in the jeep’ stage but still need controlled, decodable text as they start to tackle longer words. And it’s great that the books provide engaging non-fiction reading.

Definitely need a buddy reader
These are lovely little books, but not for teaching kids who are at the phonics level. Kids are liable to get extremely frustrated. I read the reviews about difficulty level but went ahead and purchased because one reviewer’s difficulty is normal to another and I thought it might be getting exaggerated. Well, I’ve included a picture of a page in a book and one of the message to parents so you can judge for yourself. I’m going to use it to buddy read, have my kid read only the short, easily decodable words and I’ll do the rest. Would be nice if the difficulty level was lower so they could read it independently.