But I have personally found these books with extreme limited vocabulary to be much better read-aloud books for 2-year-olds than books for independent reading by 4–5 year-olds. More generally, many other graded readers are excellent read-aloud books. At age 2–3, my kids particularly enjoyed the Henry and Mudge books https://www.amazon.com/dp/1534427139, and everything by Arnold Lobel.
If you are trying to teach kids to read, let me highly recommend Bloomfield’s workbook Let’s Read from the early 60s, which I heard about from a 2012 comment here on HN by Tokenadult. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0814311156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4665466
Bloomfield was one of the leading linguists of his era, and his book is very carefully structured to introduce only one new spelling–sound association per lesson, with the first half consisting of only regularly spelled words, so there is no possible confusion, with the full mishmash of irregular words only introduced after the reader is already fluent with regular spellings.
My son & I started working through it together for about 10–15 minutes per day when he was 3.5 years old, and it took about 8 months to get to the end, after which he could fluently read pretty much any material he could comprehend. As a not-quite-5 year-old he now happily independently reads books intended for 3rd–4th graders. (I’m not trying to suggest every kid should start on such a project at that age; every kid is different, and interests and attention span vary.)
There is some discussion of the differences in the two editions in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4665466 as well as the reviews on Amazon. I am going to give the updated version a try.
And that’s pretty amazing for your kid. That’s waaaaay above normal. We read every night to the kids, but we aren’t a huge reading family (if that makes sense)
This is part of a broader phenomenon, where most things are more complicated than you first think when you dig into it. This leads some people to assume work in areas they don't understand is easy.
'That should only take 30 minutes' - winds up taking 2 calendar weeks.
Heck I get people that think MY job is just clicking next on installers, there are entire swaths of things we do that others simply aren’t aware of because it’s transparent to them. I even had one lady question how much I made based on that very assumption. (She’s not a very nice person in general anyway)
The new CIO knew not our role and assumed we were a physical packaging team, dealing with bubble wrap and cardboard boxes - "why do we pay them so much?"
The CIO was educated pretty quickly. :-)
edit: I had time, I wrote a shorter comment.
The worst children's books are ones that don't roll off the tongue, that use too-complicated phraseology, that through circumlocution challenge the rea—well, you get it. They trip me up!
What i never realized was that a LOT of these books, Eric Carles are in that camp, are using words chosen to teach kids basic language skills and sentence formation. The ones that dont really employ a lot of those learning mechanisms, seem to be the ones that we grow tired of quickly and hit the back of the stack.. Im sure Nostalgia is part of it too.
Dr. Suess is similar and very heavy on sounds/aliteration. But you would be surprised to know that many of his books actually use very few words. Like Green Eggs and Ham is like 50 pages of sentence after sentence but only uses like 50 words total or something like that (i could be wrong, its one of the most famous ones that like that).
Honestly when I read to my young kids, i would get tired of the same books over and over and would just kinda make up the story. Now that my kids are learning to actually read, I dont do that anymore.