Kindergarten Readiness

A rhyming book that also reinforces the alphabet as Miss Bindergarten and her 26 students (whose names begin with each letter of the alphabet) prepare for the first day of school.

This book is great as a first Bible for kids to read on their own. I wouldn't choose it as a read-aloud (there are better options for reading to preschoolers, like this or this, and personally I find the illustrations unappealing), but for a budding reader, I know of no better. Some of the stories are also available as individual I Can Read! books -- we have Joseph and His Brothers -- in case reading a Bible cover to cover is too intimidating to start.

Both the praise and complaints for these early Kumon workbooks seems to run in the same vein: They offer lots of repetition. I found this one about numbers to be just right for teaching my 6-year-olds to form the numerals. Most of our number-sense learning was done with manipulatives, as it should be at this age, but the workbook also helped by reinforcing ordering and counting skills.