Friends enjoy an exciting game of baseball and Jan proves she can hit a ball well. The simple words with similar sounds help children recognize beginning and ending sounds. Rich colors illuminate the outdoor scenes and encourage new readers to use the picture and context clues to read the story.

This timeless story about sports, winners, and losers incorporates one-syllable words with similar sounds and introduces words that begin with the letter z. The story is packed with excellent situations for discussing feelings when one loses or wins, situations most children have experienced. Using primary colors to illustrate the soccer game, coupled with the facial reactions of the team, it’s easy to see which team won and which one lost.

A family fishing expedition leads Bob and Dot to a group of large rocks where they stand to fish. Rambunctious Bob takes a big hop on a rock and falls, but fortunately he isn’t hurt. Easy-to-sound-out one-syllable words for early readers to explore tell the story on these cheerful pages and encourage reading growth.

In this lifelike shopping story, the rich colors and detailed illustrations depict Tim and Kim’s shopping trip to find Kim a new hat. This charming book introduces words with phonic similarities and sentences that use sound repetition, creatively forming a comfortable reading experience for the early reader.