A Great Practice Book (Oxford Reading Tree: Stage 2: Snapdragons: Can You Get Our Ball? - Linda Strachan)

Member Name: DavyMichelle

Product:	Oxford Reading Tree: Stage 2: Snapdragons: Can You Get Our Ball? - Linda Strachan
Date:	19/08/09 (26 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Lots of Common, Easy Words.

Disadvantages: Pricy Individually

Can You Get Our Ball? Is a stage 2 Snapdragons book from the Oxford Reading Tree. You can get it as part of a pack of six Snapdragons book, usually at a good price if you get it from the Book People or similar, or you can buy this title individually from Amazon for £3.75. These are lovely books, though I personally feel £3.75 is a little steep for a single book that's just 16 pages long!

The first thing that makes this book stand out from the pack is that it's in a landscape format, rather than the usual protrait format. So you read the book left to right and top to bottom on each page, as you normally would, but you will need to explain this variant in formatting to the child you're sharing this book with. At four or five years old (the age that this book is aimed at), a child won't necessarily understand this change at first glance.

Obviously holding the book is a bit awkward, as is turning the pages up instead of over. But this is a useful variant despite the inconvenience as it teaches kids that books come in different shapes and sizes.

The story is basically that of a ball getting stuck in a tree. The kids get Mum to get it down the first time it gets stuck, but then the second time, Mum can't reach it. So Dad comes to the rescue with a ladder but he can't get it down. It doesn't matter though, because the wind comes along and sweeps it down anyway.

There's lots of easy language in this book, and lots of common words like 'said', 'Mum', 'ball', 'the', 'look' etc. The language is very simple, and there's around five or six words per page on average. There's nothing especially taxing about this book, and it makes it a good book for just practicing a lot of the key words and phonetic words that children will have started to pick up from reading a few stage one and two books before this.

The illustrations are good quality, as with all of the Snapdragons books, and I like how the kids in the book are playing football in the wind with their coats and scarves on. It gives it a feeling of reality for little readers and makes it easy for them to understand and relate to. They don't need to think hard about the story when they read this because it's so obvious and simple, they can concentrate on the reading. If the kids were dolled up in summer gear playing football on a beach surrounded by ice cream vans and a crowd of other kids, it would be harder for the little reader to concentrate on the reading aspect of the book process.

This isn't our grandson's favourite book, but he does enjoy it a little. It's particularly good as a confidence-boosting read thanks to all the simple, easy and common words that are included.

Summary: Recommended