The Good Dog Collection does elementary readers great

There is a book for every age and season of the emerging reader. Some of the books that young students can read have a very wide aged audience. That’s further complicated due to the fact that the jump to chapter books can be daunting for some kids. Our youngest is still struggling with going from simple chapter books to those with a more advanced narrative. A child’s confidence plays a big part in their reading level too. All of this boils down to a great series of books, Good Dog, that has now released the first four in that series into one compilation that will fill the bill for kids in K through fourth grade.

That’s a huge age range and Good Dog 4 Books In 1 accomplishes that with charming art and concise sentences that are on par for most rising third graders. The fact that the book is still appropriate for fourth graders is due to their chapter length and the inferences that adults would need to prompt. Understanding inferences or the things that are understood, but not expressly said can be very challenging to elementary readers.

Chapter length can be the other bugger in getting your reader to jump past the barrier that’s stopping them from embracing chapter books. They need to get there. It will make their school work much easier when they can dig into a chapter book and understand it. But chapter books, even the ones with pictures are longer and each chapter might have ten or more pages.

The chapter-length in the Good Dog book is around 9-11 pages. That may not sound like too many pages, but when you’re coming from simple chapter books that have 4-5 pages; it’s a huge difference. Also, some young readers gauge the difficulty, as well as their ability to read and understand the book, by the length of their chapters. Many young readers will psych themselves out simply by looking at how long each chapter is. Conversely, from their perspective a book with long chapters that they’re able to read and enjoy is something that could dramatically increase their confidence; in addition to encouraging them to run into other chapter books.

Witness, our 9-year-old who is able to reach much more challenging chapter books that he’s currently engaged in. He wants to read everything so perfectly that he’s hesitant to move onto books that are of the ilk that he’s going to be reading in class. We are OK with that, but recognize that the material he gets in school will be harder for him to comprehend.

Good Dog 4 Books In 1! collects Home Is Where The Heart Is, Raised In A Barn, Herd You Loud And Clear, and Fireworks Night. The length and structure of each book are similar, but will easily charm kids in K through fourth grade. Each chapter in every book has a picture on almost every page, with some pages consisting of one big picture by Airel Landy. The stories by Cam Higgins are all warm, happy and teach kids lessons about things that they’ll need to discover as they get older. Not only do the stories in Good Dog teach kids things, but they’re also fun to read and flow very nicely against the illustrations.

If you have a kindergarten student this is a great book to start them out with. They’ll love the illustrations and each chapter is short enough for you to read it to them. Slightly older readers will be able to make out most of the words themselves. Those 3^rd and 4th-grade students will find the lessons a bit young but will like the fact that they can read longer chapters. It’s also worth noting that 4th-grade students will tire of the book very quickly, but that’s a great thing because they’ll see the book as one that’s too simple for them. And that is the point in kids learning to make that jump from emerging readers to those middle elementary school students who can engage in chapter books.

Good Dog 4 Books In 1! Is by Cam Higgins with illustrations by Ariel Landy and available on Little Simon, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

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