Enjoying Familiar Faces with MyCodables

It’s back-to-school season! Hooray! This is a great time of year in our Cozy Book Corner. Why? Because we are celebrating heading back to the classroom and getting to see the teachers and kids we haven’t seen all summer. When the first school bell rings in the fall, there’s a real exuberance in the air. We love summer vacation, but we also love the chance to hear about everyone’s adventures as we settle into the new school year.

Here in the Cozy Book Corner, we never lose our appreciation for welcoming friends old and new. We believe that books and their characters can also feel like familiar friends. Opening a book about a character a student already knows is like seeing a dear classmate for the first time since summer break. A recognizable character can be the one reason a child wants to read a book at all. 

With all this in mind, we are taking a closer look at MyCodables, a new collection of books in the PVB library featuring treasured characters such as Bella and Rosie, Quack the Duck, and Jasper the Cat. Each MyCodables book set follows a character through six highly decodable titles and includes a cuddly plush companion. These characters draw students in, and each set provides multiple decoding opportunities.

All the returning characters are as plucky and entertaining as ever as they get up to their usual antics. In Mud Fun for Bella and Rosie, readers will delight as Bella and Rosie go from cute, white, and fluffy to wet, soggy, and swampy when they discover a giant mud bog. And in The Boating Adventure, Bella finds herself traveling solo down the river in a canoe. 

In the Jasper set, we see our favorite fat cat fishing with his friend Katie (Jasper Goes Fishing), chasing the cutest mole that has ever been illustrated (Jasper and the Mole), and celebrating a birthday with a cake made of fish (A Birthday Cake for Jasper). Readers can practically smell the cake themselves. Yikes! 

The storylines are rich with imagination all while exposing kids to foundational phonic elements that help them take one literacy leap after another. Quack and the Big Rig zeroes in on short i while Quack Packs for Camp is chock-full of final digraph ck. How many oo words appear in Quack’s Bad Mood? Read the book and find out!

Choose from the many MyCodables book sets available, including Quack, Bella and Rosie, Marshmallow, Jasper, Oliver the Cat, and Jack and Daisy. New characters will be added throughout the year, so check back if you don’t see your favorite!