For a book to be a good tool for the reader it must be just above their comfort level. 90% of the words should be easily read by the child, Better yet 95%. A book with low readability will cause the child to struggle and slow down and also interfere with comprehension. A high readability book will give the reader a chance to read fluently, a great, confidence building feeling ,and lead to better comprehension. Both fluency and comprehension are both super important and can develop along side reading vocabulary. If the child can read most of the words, when an unknown word appears they can use the rest of the sentence to think about what would make sense and make a good guess. Also, I know we were taught the 'sound it out' method, but as readers advance past K it becomes less and less useful as most of our common words are not phonetically regular. The first graders were always taught "What makes sense" as a first strategy, then "say the letters, does your guess fit? Sorry to butt in like this. I hope the information is useful to you.

Good to know! Thank you for the suggestion!

PS...I don't like Dr. Seuss either.

It's such a funny story, isn't it?

Those are very popular books and many kids love them, thank you for mentioning them!

I like to do is include books that are not as well known. Most lists of easy readers for kids mention great books like Frog and Toad so I like to expose parents to even more titles, which is why I chose Owl at Home. I am so glad people take the time to leave comments here with other books so thank you!