Say "Cheese!"

My two daughters (ages 2 and 4) request this book be read--at least once a day (along with all the other "Ready-to-Read" books we bought for them). They love playing with the toy cameras they already have with each other, taking pictures of each other and us. So, they especially love this book. They love to yell out, "Cheese" with the characters as they get their pictures taken by Dora. Even Diego makes an appearance in this book. I think this book is probably geared toward the preschool/beginning grade school set. It has big words and colorful pictures. The stories are simple and not too long. Certain words have little "pictographs" with the word that it's for directly underneath it in smaller print. I suppose this is to help the child learn to read these certain words. Since my daughters are still pretty young (the oldest is now just learning the sounds different letters make; she already can recognize all the letters), we haven't really tried to use these little pictures in that way. Although, we've read this story so many times to them that they "read along" by reciting from memory certain parts of the story. All Dora the Explorer books are great fun for the kids because it involves them in the story much like the TV show does. I highly recommend it.

My son loves Dora. He also is very late in verbal development. This book really helped because he had so much fun participating in the story, that he seemed to forget to be shy about speaking. The book is set up with a combination of words and pictures so your child can 'read' along when you get to the pictures. This book only works if your child is familiar with the Dora universe though. For instance, there is a picture of Boots every time in the story you would normally read the word Boots. If the child doesn't know who Boots is, it isn't going to make any sense to them. The book is great for the pre-reader. It shows them how to scan a page (top to bottom, left to right) to read the story and allows them to participate and help 'read' the story. For those familiar with other Dora books, it is written in a much simpler style. (most of the other books seem to be full scripts for the tv shows and can seem terribly long sometimes). Would recommend!