Need list of books with repeated phrases

Miss Mary Mack
I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly
Little Rabbit Foo Foo
Five Little Ducks
Skip to my Lou
Itsy Bitsy Spider(any nusery rhyme)
Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed
Teddy Bear Teddy Bear
Peanut Butter and Jelly
Fiddle-i-Fee
Oh, A-Hunting We Will go

These are just a few I pulled off my book shelf this morning. I also suggest getting a finger play book(see the kdg teachers in your school).

Most of the books I listed came from Scholastic. Hunting we will go and itsy bitsy came from Houghton Mifflin and were part of an older reading series.

My favorite:
Oh a hunting we will go , a hunting we will go, we’ll catch a fox and put him in a box, and then we’ll let him go and on and on.

Miss Mary Mack is a classic.

Also I suggest you get a book on jump rope rhymes. I used to use those when I taught younger grades.

How about “The Napping House”? Also look at Mem Fox’s work. She does a lot of repeating to help emergent readers.

Cynthia Rylant (e.g., “When I Was Young In the Mountains”) and Jane Yolen (e.g. “Nocturne”)

I have two excellent resources:

Ray, Katie W. (1999). “Wonderous Words.” Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
One of my all-time fav books. Check w/this org for other good titles to suit your needs.

Norton, Donna E. (1991). “Through the Eyes of a Child: An Introduction to Children’s Literature.” (5th Ed.) Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill/Prentice Hall.
The CD that accompanies this book is fantastic.

Chick a Chick a Boom Boom.

Repeated phrases are tons of fun, excellent for learning rhythm and language patterns.

But the big question is why you want them — are the kids really learning to read and using these for further practice and enjoyment?
Or are the kids learning to memorize and recite from picture cues? And to guess what the next predictable phrase is?

Unfortunately, the “whole-language” people claim (with absolutely no experimental foundation, in fact the research shows the exact opposite) that memorize-and-recite-and-guess will automatically lead to reading. It won’t, and for many kids it causes a lot of trouble because they have to get rid of the run ahead and guess habit before they can really learn to read. Many of us here have spent literally years unteaching several kids.

Please check up on the reading research — the giant NIH study, available here on LD In Depth board, is a good place to start. Then make sure your kids are really reading and not just copying the next phrase of the rhyme. Sure word games are fun, but they’ll thank you for the rest of their lives for helping them become independent readers. AFTER they have the skills in place to really read, then you can give them all the fun books and they will run through them like a house afire.

I like repeated phrases because of the confidence and fluency building such books bring about. Of course, I presume the child has been taught decoding. The ability to combine phonics with predicition from contextual clues is powerful.

I did try to be reasonable in my post, and I believe I said that.

For about 30-40% of the population (that chunk from about the 40th percentile to the 70-80% level), books with repeated readings will *help* toward good student reading achievement.

In the regular classroom, I don’t do intensive phonics with my “normal range” group. I use whole language comprehension approaches with a PA (modified Lindamood) intro for emergent readers.

Pre-K & lower-primary such repeaters. They love the predictability. The rhythm. It’s jazz! Now, there are those in the gifted range that are much too mature for anything fluffy. That isn’t the bulk in the middle, though. When they’re finished w/Chica, I’ll find something else fun.

Of course, like everything in education, I have to caveat this by saying that I would not use this to *teach reading* to my developmental and remedial group. I would have them come & dance/play while we listened to the guy sing and follow along in a big book. Then, they would also have a very fine phonics lesson with lots of modeling and guided practice and PA.

There was a time when I did not believe that I would write a post such as this. I was totally against whole language.
Four years later, I believe that every single thing in reading/language arts is not about phonics for every single child.

I ask St. Francis for the wisdom to know the difference.

Amen. The Social/Ethno Post-Modernists can’t lay a claim on world literature - obviously Western and Hebrew (some Semitic literature is acceptable to them) are - let’s see if I can use a term the post modernists would use - VERBOTEN! all to say, whole language Nazis never owned the love of literature in their “movement”.

For those wishing to argue the psycho-babble of the Post-Modernists - don’t waste your breath. They’ve rejected all Western Culture since the Enlightenment. Like Sauron in his tower, they sit in their ivory towers feeling superior - feeling above the rest of us - the only fun in all of this will be when they all turn on each other -

It’s not, and it’s never been all about phonics here. Phonics is a tool, used to unlock the interesting stuff in the books. Learn the phonics *in order to* play all you want, anywhere you want, in the literature field. I do feel very strongly that every kid, *especially* the gifted one who picks up fast, needs this tool. Working as a tutor with all age groups, I scream in frustration at the gifted kids who stall out in upper elementary because they were doing “so well” with memorization that the teacher skipped the phonics. They were not doing well; they were using their intelligence to invent coping and faking skills instead of learning something of value. Then they and I have to go back and spend their valuable learning time desperately trying to unteach and unlearn guessing habits, bad spelling, and worse handwriting, when they could have been reading/writing any book they wanted if they had simply been taught to read instead of guess. Some do unlearn, and many become gifted dropouts (one in my own family). One more time, I think enjoyment of literature is the goal, and I and many kids like and use those word games all the time — I just want the kid to be able to read them with independence and confidence.

(No More)

Chica chica boom boom. Will there be enough room?

Guess I’m not smart enough for all that other and will just be content to sing/dance with the kindergarten kiddos.

Perhaps I wasn’t clear; I’m not downing phonics—only saying that there is more to reading than just that. However, I’m too exhausted to continue to dissect this subject. Chica Chica to you, too. :-)