Tommy the Turtle takes a Tumble provided by Bravenet.com

Tommy the Turtle takes a Tumble

A children's book by Yvonne Koslowsky

Educational Value

Navigation

Kindergarten through grade two is the most important time in a young child's life to develop the ability to read fluently, easily, and enthusiastically. The joy of reading should extend to the point that your children are reading by themselves and asking for more new stories to read. This was one of the factors in the development of the story, "Tommy the Turtle takes a Tumble." As Konnie Hawkins, the third grade teacher at Laytonville Elementary School in California said about the book, "Imaginative characters and fun for all. Kids will get into this."

The story is fun to read and it includes key elements for reading development in those important early years. Word decoding, the ability to use one's knowledge of links between letters and sounds to identify words, is fundamental to a youngster's ability to recognize a word on their own.

Good readers rely mainly on the letters in a word to read it, not the pictures. As a check to see how your young child is doing, cover up the pictures in "Tommy the Turtle Takes a Tumble" as your child reads to you. He or she should be able to read the story without using any visual cues. Over time, these words will be recognized easily and rapidly and fluency will improve.

The axiom, "practice makes perfect," fits with reading. Fluency is the accuracy and rate with which children perform reading tasks.

Kindergarten Practice

Grade 1

Grade 2

Kindergarten readers will see emu and convert it into the letters e m u , then make the sound for each letter, and finally string the different sounds together as eeeemmmmuuuu.

The blending of letter strings is important for children to advance in the reading development process.

In first grade, young readers begin to learn consonant blends such as school where the "sch" is a "sk" sound.

Children develop r-controlled letter-sound associations such as Ruby the rabbit. R-words help the tongue get used to forming the sound using the roof of the mouth.

Vowel digraphs are introduced in the first grade too. Words like snail with the "ai" sound and hoops with the "oo" sound give the children a chance to explore new word sounds. Other vowel digraphs in "Tommy the Turtle Takes a Tumble" include:
touch
tail
floor
weasel
beam
looked

More Vowel Digraphs

During the second grade, practice with multisyllabic words and more complex spelling patterns are practiced. In "Tommy the Turtle Takes a Tumble," a lot of two syllable words such as swinging, tumbling, flying, faster, and covered are used.

Complex spelling patterns are presented through the use of quickly, laughter, and everywhere in the story.

Balancing is one of the two, three-syllable words used in the book. As your child begins the third grade, he or she will be exposed to many more three syllable words and complex combinations.