Pete the Cat's Train Trip (My First I Can Read)

My English language learners love Pete the Cat. This is a nice story for emerging early readers, as the illustrations help children to understand any new vocabulary that they don't know. In this book, Pete explores a train and tells his story about travelling to see his grandma. My ESL students really latched on to and understood the concept and had great discussions after they read it. Great little learning tool. Fun illustrations!

I was surprised at the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the Pete the Cat line...I definitely didn't agree. Everyone's got their idea of what makes for good reading.

If you have a train enthusiast...give this one a go. If not, here's why I didn't like it. First, I felt there were too many words sprinkled through that were just plain hard for what the AR system lists as a 1.7 book. Secondly, boring story. Third, I really dislike the art! Ugh. I think some of my kids could draw better pictures than this.

I've teaching my 5th child to read, so I've read plenty of "boring" little-kid-learning-to-read books, but this seemed to have no redeeming quality to it. Usually, I can lean into the beauty of the art or the cuteness of the story and enjoy the book along with my kids. This had neither.

Plenty of other fish in the sea, in my opinion.