Monday, April 10, 2017

Fly Guy Phonics

Fly Guy Phonics. Tedd Arnold. 2017. Scholastic. [Source: Review copy]

First sentence from first book: Fly Guy likes to go to school with Buzz. He likes going to class. But most of all he likes lunch. The lunchroom has the best trash cans! He loves to grab a snack in the trash can. Until the day he meets the lunch lady, Roz. "This is bad," thinks Fly Guy.

Premise/plot: This boxed-phonics set features ten books and two work books. Each book focuses on a short or long vowel sound. One workbook focuses on short vowel sounds; the other workbook focuses on long vowel sounds. Within each story, the words in bold are the "practice" words illustrating the sound.

My thoughts: I don't know why I always associate phonics books with being short, simple, not much story, and having a very limited vocabulary. The books in this phonics boxed set certainly break that pattern. The books have a lot of text. If a reader is truly only learning about short vowel and long vowel sounds, I'm not sure how they'd read the rest of the text on their own. These do not seem to be written for a very beginning reader. I'm not sure where they'd be on the scale of things--but I'm not seeing these as being A, B, C, or even D. But that being said, I think the stories are fun enough for what they are.

Though the books all have a copyright of 2017, I feel that some of these stories are taken from earlier Fly Guy books. Perhaps not word for word, perhaps with some changes to highlight the particular vowel sound being highlighted in that specific book.


© 2017 Becky Laney of Becky's Book Reviews

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