Product Description

This collection of stories at Stage 1 develops children's early reading skills and supports speaking and listening as you discuss their favourite characters and the stories' familiar settings. Notes inside the cover of every storybook cover opportunities for language comprehension, word recognition and school/home links. This mixed pack consists of six different Stage 1 titles. Kipper Storybooks are also available in a class pack of 36 books or a Big Book pack.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #23074 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-10
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 8 pages

Customer Reviews

No text to read
We have enjoyed the Oxford Reading Tree books with my daughter in the past and now that my son is about to start to read we ordered this pack. What I didnt know, and perhaps I should have researched better, is that this pack (Level 1) has no actuall text in the books to read.

We wanted to have my son sounding out basic words, but there isnt any text (only pictures). I dont think there is anything wrong with the product, but I wish in the description it would have mentioned this so we could have ordered a level 2 pack instead.

fun learning, not hard core education.
I believe in letting the child set the pace of learning, so I found these books an excellent way to help develope my daugters mind instead of just concentrating on words. Anyone can memorise words, however these books are designed to streatch the imagination and social skills of the child. My daughter found these books far more interesting than other books as we had to spend more time discussing and exploring all aspects of each page and use her imagination and judgement of how people behave and feel to guess what might happen next in the story.

I found these books helped my daughter understand how people feel in certain situations and why people act a certain way when they are happy/sad/excited/nervouse/worried etc. and greatly improved her social skills.

An invaluable part of the emotional learning process.

Stilted, babyish, poorly considered
A supposed "fan" of these dreadful books ( which are arguably at the root of the epidemic of dyslexia which has been ravaging British schools since the late 1970s ) reviewed a modern series of synthetic phonics real story books with the slur "unnatural language". This sums up the situation: proper stories in real sentences using some long ( though phonically elementary) words are considered "unnatural" by proponents of the Oxford Reading Tree approach. What they presume to be "natural" for 4-7 year olds is , by contrast, baby language suitable for 2-3year olds but nonetheless involving grapheme-phoneme combinations which are not mastered until the later phases of Letter and Sounds, or indeed any more carefully designed phonic scheme. This is so typical of the age in which we infantilise young children, filling their heads with oochy-woochy-koochy nonsense until they pass the optimum age for mastering literacy when we bombard them with premature sexualisation and turbo consumerism.

It is high time Oxford University Press took a long hard look at its children's books and started opening up to genuine educational developments. A study of the content and vocabulary of books for young children from 100 years ago might throw light on how the more recent the commercial pressures in publishing bear a large part of the responsibility for the mis-education of today's financial and political bullies and the demise of education in Britain.

If you want to help children to read don't touch this stuff. Look out for books by Jescott Bodkin or Ruth Miskin.