These resources are invaluable for developing your child’s skills from the first steps of recognizing letters to fluently reading chapter books and doing independent internet research. They can be used in many creative ways and make learning fun and playful. Make sure to set them up within an easy reach for your children, they will WANT to use them.
This post contains Amazon affiliate links, but all the choices are the resources we enjoyed a lot with our child and hope you will, too. Using these links will not cost you any extra.
Best resources for recognizing letters and learning alphabet
Alphabet Soup
Melissa and Doug Alphabet Lacing Beads
Learn alphabet while also developing fine motor skills.
Lacing Sweets
We had a lot of fun with these “sweets” as well as scooper and the container.
LEGO DUPLO Alphabet Truck
Possibilities are endless with this set, especially if you already own other LEGO DUPLO sets. A child can combine creative building, imaginative play, and learning the alphabet.
Alphabet Train for Your Train Table
Try making a train with a name from different letters, arrange them as an alphabet train, make any word you like. We already had a train table and other trains, so it was a great addition.
Melissa and Doug Alphabet and Number Stamps
This is a great value set that will last for a while – it includes storage case, upper and lower case letters, numbers, punctuation signs, ink pad, AND 25-page activity book to put it into action. We used these great stamps to create memory cards and greeting cards, incorporate words into our art projects, even to start our own stories and “publish” our own little books. The possibilities are endless!
Usborne Alphabet Sticker Book
This 24-page book with 8 pages of stickers encourages kids to not only use stickers, but also to trace and color them, further reinforcing the learning.
Leapfrog Letter Factory and Talking Words Factory in a Bundle
Fun songs in these wonderful videos will have kids singing letter sounds in no time. Cannot imagine learning letter-sound correspondence without it. Was worth every penny!
Big Pre-School Workbook
Big Kindergarten Workbook
Big 1st Grade Workbook
These nicely spaced out, colorful workbooks are a great value and cover a wide range of skills.
Best resources for making short words
AlphaBee Letters, Numbers, and Shapes
Cute bumblebee carrying case opens to reveal 40 multicolor tiles with uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and 4 popular shapes, plus activity cards.
Daily Word Ladders for Grades 1-2
150+ reproducible word study lessons that help kids boost reading, vocabulary, spelling and phonics skills.
Matching Letter Game
Fun board game to play with your child matching pictures to simple words – learning to read and spell.
Sight Words Zingo
The words included are AND, COME, FOR, HERE, MY, SAID, THE, THREE, WE, WHERE, ARE, HAVE, OUR, SHE, THERE, THEY, WENT, WHAT, WHO, ME, IN, TWO, NOW, WANT. Not a lot, but if you have a laminator you could make more yourself.
Sight Words Bingo
Covers 46 sight words.
My kid is so bored with sight words! Study roots, prefixes, suffixes, and grammar as an alternative
Rummy Roots
Learning word roots is an alternative to memorizing sight words that my child enjoyed. This set can be used for 4 recommended vocabulary card games. It teaches 42 Greek and Latin Roots.
English from the Roots Up
This is the book introduces 50 Latin and Greek roots. You could buy the cards to go with this manual, but we enjoyed making cards ourselves instead.
Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons
Ready-to-go lessons for 20-minute a day parent-child learning. First 5-10 sessions are the most difficult for your child, make sure you stick to it – you should start seeing progress by the lesson 10. Once you establish a routine and do not give up and finish the lessons, the claim of the program is that your child will read at the second-grade level.
The Reading Lesson: Teach your child to read in 20 lessons
Another easy to use step-by-step course for parents who want to teach their young children to read at home. It is available as a Kindle or paper version.
Kindergarten Reading Center Kit
Designed for a Reading Center, this kit gives kids the opportunity to work independently with self directed and self correcting activities. Comes with 1 bases and 5 sets of curriculum – Alphabet, Beginning Consonants, Rhyming Words, Beginning Vocabulary, and Vowels. Each curriculum pack comes with 12 cards and 12 challenges on each card. Once you have the pallet, you can get extra insert sets for math and reading K-3+ grade.
Sight Words Readers Pack
This is a set of 25 little books that teach 50 of the most frequently used words. It includes a mini-workbook with fun activities and write-and-learn pages to give kids practice writing the words too.
Bob’s Books: Beginning Readers
Tried and true classic for beginning readers. However, my son did enjoy colorful Usborne My First Library set more.
Usborne My First Reading Library
These quality colorful books put Bob’s books to shame. They are engaging, well thought out, and a pleasure to take into your hands. The set includes 50 books to guide your child through the first stages of reading with access to online resources. Includes books from Usborne Very First Reading series plus higher-level books, what makes it a great value. These books, as well as other Usborne selections, hold up great to pass to your friends or sell after you are done and they are in great demand.
Dr. Seuss’s Beginner Book Collection
The story goes that in 1954, a magazine report speculated that one of the reasons for declining children’s literacy was that kid’s readers were boring. Ted Seuss Geisel took up the challenge and wrote Cat in the Hat using 220 words suitable for beginning readers. His books were funny, engaging, filled with catchy rhymes, and silly characters, and they enticed readers to turn pages. His book became one of the most popular children’s books in history and more followed. All these books are time-proven classics for starting the child’s independent reading journey.
Best first books for independent reading
Usborne Beginners Animals Box Set
The set of 10 books – Bears, Dangerous Animals, Elephants, Farm Animals, Monkeys, Pandas, Penguins, Sharks, Tigers, and Wolves.
Usborne Beginners History Box Set
The set of 10 hardback books – Ancient Greeks, Castles, Celts, Digging Up the Past, Egyptians, Iron Age, Maya, Romans, Stone Age, and Vikings.
Usborne Beginners Science Box Set
There are 10 internet-linked books in the set, including: Astronomy, Earthquakes, Living in Space, Planet Earth, The Solar System, Storms and Hurricanes, Sun, Moon and Stars, Volcanoes, Weather, and Your Body.
Usborne Children’s Encyclopedia
This 320-page book is arranged by the following topics: Our World, Animals and Plants, How Your Body Works, History, How People Live, Science, How Things Work, Space, and Maps of the World. Scan QR-links for carefully selected internet sites – great to introduce your growing youngster to doing independent internet research.
Hope you enjoyed these selections! If you have comments or would like to tell us about your favorites, please use the comments section below.
Usborne Confident Reader Collection
Nicely illustrated quality literature, with a nice variety of styles to develop vocabulary and to find the themes children enjoy – in 40 small paperbacks that do not overwhelm a child.
Books included: The Story of Cars, Treasure Island, The Story of the Olympics, Mystery Mansion, The Fairgound Ghost, The Story of Flying, Jason and The Golden Fleece, The Shocking Story of Electricity, Hercules The World’s Strongest Man, The Amazing Adventures of Ulysses, The Incredible Present, The Magical Book, The Midnight Ghosts, The Prince and the Pauper, A Little Princess, Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, The Phantom of the Opera, Robin Hood, The Firebird, The Canterville Ghost, The Enchanted Castle, Aesop’s Fables, East of The Sun, West of the Moon, Twelfth Night, The Count of Monte Cristo, Othello, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, White Fang, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Me. Hyde, Stories of Vampires, Little Women, Pompeii, The Three Musketeers, Oliver Twist, Anne Frank, Frankenstein, The Odyssey, William Shakespeare.