BOB books

Even though Micah is only 2 1/2, I'm thinking about ways to begin teaching him to read. He learned the alphabet, or at least the ABC song, quite a while ago, and we've been working on numbers lately. He has one through 10 mastered; now we're working on going backwards.

I've been contemplating home-schooling lately -- both the general idea of home-schooling and whether or not it might be a good fit for our family -- and have been reading The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home (Third Editition). One of the ideas the book provides is to use something called BOB books to teach your child to read. I searched around and found these: Bob Books, Set 1: Beginning Readers. Costco actually has them at a great price right now, since it's that back-to-school time of the year, but Amazon is my go-to first stop when doing any kind of initial product research.

I bought the first set for Micah, and my initial reaction was that the books look kind of boring. The set consists of thin but well-made (stitched, not glued) paperbacks, each of which is comprised of line art, simple black, red, blue, and yellow colors, and brief storylines. As I thought more about them, though, I realized that's exactly the point; kids are meant to focus on the words and learn how to read, not get swept away by rich illustrations.

Micah likes the books so far and has requested to read them several times. As of now, though, I am trying to work on letter recognition. While he can say all the letters pretty well and spell C-A-R (his most favorite thing in the entire world), he doesn't yet recognize them. I'd love to create several alphabet placemats and have them laminated so that we can work on this during mealtime, but that may be beyond me at the moment, since work is crazy and my 5 month old will only sleep for 4 hour stretches at the most! at night before rousing and crying like there's no tomorrow, leaving us all pretty tired.