MSH: Sight Words #1 (Spider-Man - Spider-Man's Webs)

Background

This boxed set of "Sight Words" books is published by Scholastic Australia. I don't believe that it was sold in the United States, so you'll have to look hard to find one.

Story Details

The box is 7.7" x 5.6". It contains 12 soft-cover, full-color stapled books each one being 5.5" x 7.5" and 12 pages long. Ten of the books are stories, while the last two books are "workbooks" which contain simple word puzzles and word games.

Each story targets four specific words. Of the eleven pages in the story, about half are full-page illustrations, while others contain the text (and sometimes also a small illustration). Each of the five or six text blocks in the tale are roughly 15-20 words long.

General Comments

In general, Marvel book-format material is crap. From kindergarten bed-time tales to teenage novels – it really doesn't seem to matter. Most of them are just varying degrees of awful.

But this little collection is one of the few exceptions. It's very, very good. The artwork is (as far as I can tell) completely original. The stories are original, and they stick shamelessly to their goal of teaching kids to read.

Spider-Man loves to swing.
He swings from lots of things.
He swings with his webs.

Utterly on target.

Overall Rating

Never before in my life have I read a Spider-Man Book and thought to myself "This is great, I should show this to my kids." But for the first time ever, I really will do just that.

I genuinely intend to give these book to my five year old, and sit down and read it with him.

Well, almost. Obviously I'm not going to give him my mint edition archive copy. I'll buy a second copy and give him that. The original is going on my shelves, stored in an acid-free plastic bag.

Five Webs.