Bear Can Read: Empower Children with Social-Emotional & Literacy Skills (Sight Word Reader Books)

Product Information

Each delivery focuses on the group of letters and sounds your child needs to learn, with games and activity sheets to assist them, and advice for parents on how to be helpful. Each box also boosts critical words like ‘the’, ‘do’ and ‘go’ – the words that children can’t sound out using phonics. Month by month, your child builds confidence. An accurate reading is also really important for your child’s future learning at school. Throughout primary and secondary school – and right through further education and beyond – it’s so much harder to learn effectively without good reading skills. Learning their phonics will help your child to read accurately and focus on the meaning – which will enable them to learn so much more effectively in every part of the curriculum! My 3 year old is just getting into the worksheets, but absolutely loves all the stories and books that come in her parcel every month. The addition of a character to support the stories is a wonderful touch. By far the best children’s subscription we’ve had (and we’ve done a lot of craft and baking ones previously). The Bear Can Read brings fun and focus to children’s reading – 10 to 15 minutes every day makes all the difference.

Once you join your child will receive a bundle of books and activities delivered to your door each month. Just let us know the book band level your child uses at school to start or we can sensibly place your child based on their age, school stage and the time in the school year (see our handy chart). We will work with you and tweak their reading level until it is just right. Targeted practice In the word ‘night’, the long ‘i’ sound is spelled with three letters, ‘igh’. So, we put a dash under all three letters, to show they are a trigraph – three letters that make one sound. The word ‘squirrel’ has six sound buttons in all – and there are six sounds in the word, s-qu-i-rr-e-l. As you can see, sound buttons are a handy way to see how many sounds there are in a word. They also show which are single-letter sounds, and which are digraphs or trigraphs. This helps your child to read the word. Also, if they add their own sound buttons to words, it will really help your child to identify all the different sounds and get used to the way the word looks written down. This will help their spelling, as well as their reading! Phonics activitiesThe Bear Can Read was founded to make learning to read at home easier for children and their families. We do this by assembling the best phonics material – books at the right level, focussed worksheets and expert advice, all delivered with a fine balance of purpose and fun. When your child is learning each set of sounds it is really important they have access to books that closely match their phonics knowledge. There is a big difference between phonics books and popular storybooks. Sharing stories is an important part of developing a love of reading, however, when children are learning to read they need access to books that match their phonics knowledge. When I originally wrote my review for The Bear Can Read there were boxes for 2/3 year old, 3/4 year old’s, reception, year 1 & year 2. Now they’ve added an independent reader’s box as well. I originally brought the 3-4 year old’s box for Smallest Child (3 & 3 months) but I was also gifted a 2-3 year old’s box to compare the two. Now Smallest Child has started school we’ve set up our own subscription at the 4-5 years level. What’s in the cubs box? (2-3 years) Camilla has 16 years’ experience with educational publishing, with in particular expertise in children’s reading and phonics. During her career Camilla has worked at Ladybird, Penguin Random House, Pearson and Oxford University Press. Camilla commissioned then managed Pearson’s best-selling reading programme, Bug Club. As a Senior Publisher at Oxford University Press Camilla was instrumental in developing Oxford Reading Buddy, a ground-breaking virtual reading service for primary schools.

My 6 year old can sometimes be harder to encourage, but the length and complexity of the worksheets are perfect for her attention span and once she completes one she is keen to work on more. If you look at ‘squirrel’ above, you’ll see that there is a dot or a dash under each sound in the word. The letter ‘s’ has a dot because it’s just one letter making one sound. The letters ‘i’, ‘e’ and ‘l’ have one dot each too, for the same reason. But ‘qu’ and ‘rr’ get a dash because those are both digraphs – two letters that make one sound together.The cubs box that we tried was all about festivals. There was an interactive board book about Chinese New Year. Smallest Child absolutely loved this book. It was really vibrant and a great way to start off learning about different world festivals. There were also craft ideas to help them learn about Christmas, Diwali, Chinese New Year and Hanuka. The boxes included all the resources to do the crafts. There’s also some additional activities in the box, instructions on how to use the resources and a recipe to make some bear biscuits.

I have spent my whole career in publishing, but the last 10 years I worked as a children’s educational publisher. After writing my MA thesis on early literacy, and researching the importance of establishing reading habits from a young age and what a huge difference it makes if parents are involved to support reading at home, I knew I wanted to build my career in children’s publishing. The Bear Can Read, a subscription service delivering bespoke early literacy and phonics bundles to children aged 2-7 so that parents can support them at home, was an idea that bubbled away a couple of years until I finally took the leap. Did you ever sit down and plan your career? That’s because each letter in ‘pumpkin’ makes a sound on its own – there are seven letters and seven sounds in the word. There are no digraphs, so no dashes!Not sure which level your child needs? Have a look at our bear clubs and see what's included in the boxes. 4. Read with enjoyment As parents, we know how hard it can be to learn to read. So we set out to create simple, targeted worksheets and activities with phonics experts. We also ensure that the books are not only the newest and most engaging on the market but they specifically focus on the letters and sounds that the child is learning that month.