Twenty-Four Robbers

So, of course, if you're a teacher you can move on from this book by teaching the jump rope rhyme to the kids. Always good to get them moving, makes things stick in the mind, doesn't it? (Well, it's just fun.) The illustrations in this book are a little messy, but they're bright and colorful, and the pattern of the story is not to be missed.

This book was a favorite of mine growing up and now my three boys love it. It is great for early readers as well as pre-readers who are learning their alphabet. A thoroughly enjoyable book!

If you can find the hardcove of this, buy it for your toddler/crawler. The pictures are great, colorful, full of detail. The expressions on the faces will delight parentes as they read this over and over to their child. I recommend the hardcover, because both my 1-5 year olds banged this around for nearly 7 years; the softcovers won't hold up to that kind of use. But, if that's all you can find, get it anyway. Both you and your children will love it.

Children learn to read by recognizing (memorizing) increasingly large numbers of words on sight (developing a reading vocabulary). A book like this is one that progresses in a cadence (is singable) and thus, easy to memorize. A great book for new readers, because as they memorize while looking at the book, they begin to recognize and add new words to their reading vocabularies. They don't even realize they are doing it. How do I know this? Well, I am in my mid twenties, and I can remember almost all of this book, though I haven't seen it for about 20 years. I remember reading it over and over. It was one of the first books that I learned to read. Just the other day, I woke up reciting the opening line from the book, and decided to try to find it. I would highly recommend this book for parents trying to interest their kids in reading. It is one that you won't get tired of, even though you might read it about a thousand times!!