Usborne Very First Reading: Book 1 - Pirate Pat

Written by: Mairi MacKinnon

Illustrated by: Mike and Carl Gordon

Pages: 32 pages

Format: Hard cover

Genre: Children’s Book

Reading Level: 3 – 5 years old 

• An exciting story to inspire very beginner readers.
• Based on the principles of synthetic phonics, supports the "Letters and Sounds" programme used in thousands of UK primary schools.
• Adult and child take turns to read, and the child’s text uses only the letters s a t p i n m d.
• Fun puzzles test understanding, and provide opportunities for discussion and further reading practice.

My thoughts:

I have a two and a four year old boy who is more interested with the iPad and watching cartoons on TV than reading. I wanted the kids to have more exposure to reading actual books rather than the storybook apps that they go through on our gadgets. So I did some research and found the Usborne Very First Reading Series and figured I’d give it a try with my boys.

How this book works is that the parent reads one part and the kids read another. The process is repeated until the end of the story.

Both my boys can’t read yet but what I do is I place my finger on each letter I am reading so that hopefully they can recognize some of the words if we continue doing this often enough.

My boys are quite into Pirates so they did like this book a lot. The simple rhyming used to tell the story makes it interesting to read together with the boys. My two year old especially loves it when I read this to him.

Overall we quite enjoyed reading about Pirate Pat. I’ve only purchased this book last Friday and we’ve read it about three times together over the past few days. That’s a good sign. Overall I give this book a 5/5 on Goodreads.

Oh before I forget, the book also has puzzles that you can use as activities with the kids. My kids are not so interested in them yet but I'm sure they will once they get a hang of how it works. 

This week I’m aiming to read the second book in the series titled, The Dressing-Up Box. I have a feeling my boys won’t like reading about dressing up so much as they do reading about pirates but I’m gonna give this a go anyway.