This is a tricky phase. I second the suggestions for Elephant & Piggy and Level 1 guided readers.

But my biggest suggestion for you is to not expect your kid at this level to read ANY books on their own. Yes, I'm sure he can probably read BOB books on his own, They are very short and as a PP said, they have all regular words, and very simple sentences. Even the lowest level readers will have more complexity than that, and for a brand new reader, it will be exhausting to navigate irregular words, longer sentences, and certainly even short paragraphs.

The key to getting past the frustration is to read with them. Try reading Elephant & Piggy and each playing a role, so they just read the Piggy parts (or Elephant, whatever). Those books are set up with word bubbles that are color coded, which makes this extra easy. Or do a Level 1 reader and trade off pages, or even sentences. And if they fatigue or say "can you just read the rest?" just go ahead and read the rest to them.

People really underestimate how taxing reading is for a brand new reader. Their brains are doing so many things at this stage and even just a few sentences of reading practice can wear them out. As long as they are getting a little practice in, and then doing a phonics-based curriculum at school (this is really important), they will get better and better and then they'll be able to read these on their own.

For my kid who started reading BOB books a few months before K started, it was not until the end of K where she really felt comfortable reading a full Level 1 reader totally on her own. By the end of 1st grade, she was happily reading chapter books on her own (stuff like Princess in Black or Magic Treehouse), and it grew from there. But that time between BOB books and reading early readers solo took longer than I expected. You just have to stick with it and don't ask too much of them. Continue to read with them and to them, it will build their vocabularies and fluency as long as it's paired with phonics training.

Biscuits
Pete the Cat
Books by Mercer Mayor
Dr Seuss books such as Red fish Blue fish
Splat the cat
Duck and Goose

Pick up an actual reading program.

Phonics Pathways
All About Reading
Explode the Code
Etc

Those early readers aren’t really decodable. (Think about reading the word ‘Biscuit’. Or ‘laugh’. Not so straight forward is it? Even picture books have words that are fairly difficult to read when first starting out.

Ditto on Dear Dragon books. They have them at the library and they're the perfect bridge books.

Anonymous wrote:For phonics, the Primary Phonics series has longer stories and more challenging words.

This series is what our Montessori school uses. Probably can be bought online from a home school supply place.

Yeah I am struggling with this for my kid too. She likes animals so we have found these little National Geographic books about ie red pandas, polar bears etc. She also likes Pete the Cat and Bad Kitty.

Haha, PIGGIE, not Biggie, LOL

We went BOB - Elephant & Biggie - Level 1 Early Readers - and so forth.

My daughter is around the same level. She likes Biscuit books and Scholastic first readers. They have First Little Readers and then other nonfiction readers. They have them on Amazon and they comes in packs of 16-25 depending on the level in small boxes like the BOB books.

Green Eggs and Ham. I know Dr Seuss is on the outs but all my kids read Green Eggs and Ham as their first "big book."

We did level 1 and level 2 readers after BOB books. My kids especially loved Mac and Cheese.

Anonymous wrote:Many Elephant and Piggie are good and right in that range

Can't recommend this series enough. Not a lot of words, but very funny stories that my daughter loved and would read over and over. She didn't really like the Bob books bc she found them boring.

*get them hooked

Whatever they are really interested in to get them booked. For DS, that was the kids Ninjago and Star Wars books. He couldn’t read them all on his own at first but we would read to him and then he would read them on his own too. For DD it was Frozen.