What Is the First Book You Learned to Read? Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. Book Thursday.

Dick. Jane. See Spot Run. What is the first book you learned to read?

Run, Spot, run.

How Do You Help Johnnie Read?

The learning theory behind reading from the 1930s until the 1970s, when the Dick and Jane series was prominent, was limited, carefully stepped vocabulary, with much repetition.

Phonics, an emphasis on teaching the sound of each letter and combination of letters, came of age in the 1970s through the 1990s, because the look and say approach of the Dick and Jane series had left many children unable to read.

How Do Children Learn to Read Today?

Now, though phonics is still taught, an emphasis on rhyming, a rich vocabulary and context are also considered helpful in learning to read.

Perhaps this is why the first book my nearly six-year-old grandson read to me all by himself this past summer was Chicka Chicka Boom Boom.

What Is the Story?

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom shows the letters of the alphabet climbing up a coconut tree, then falling out, in the course of a day and an evening.

Published in 1989, its approach differs considerably from my remembered introduction to Dick and Jane.

The story is fun and interesting.

The vocabulary is appropriate, varied, not limited to single syllables and it rhymes.

The illustrations help tell the story.

Repetition is natural, tied to something children know by now, the alphabet, and leads the reader through the story line from A to Z, twice.

I love this children’s book.

Watch the Story