GREAT EARLY CHAPTER BOOKS

When My son was younger these were among his most favorite books. He made sure we saved these so he could pass them on to his little brother to read to him once he is old enough. These are simple chapter books. They range in page count from about 68 to 96 pages I believe so they are relatively quick reads that can be read in a few nights depending upon your child's reading level. This set contains the first four books in the series:

Book #1, DINOSAURS BEFORE DARK

Book #2, THE KNIGHT AT DAWN

Book #3, MUMMIES IN THE MORNING

Book #4, PIRATES PAST NOON

The First, Dinosaurs Before Dawn tells the story of how jack and Annie (the series stars) first find the Magic Tree House and learn how the books can transport them to magical lands and worlds. The first takes them to the Cretaceous period. Through clues and reading the book in hand they learn and discover things about dinosaurs.

In the "Knight at Dawn", jack and Annie are transported back to medieval times. They find a castle and go exploring and find themselves on the run from the castle guards and worry they will never get back to the magic tree house.

"mummies In the Morning" Jack has always been fascinated by and pick up a book that has them traveling back to ancient Egypt. Jack and Annie enter a pyramid and get lost inside. Inside they find the ghost of an Egyptian queen whose been trapped inside the pyramid for ages and Jack and Annie try to set her free.

"Pirates Past Noon" Jack and Annie picture a wonderful beach and are transported to the times of Pirates where they are capture by Captain Bones who is seeking the treasure of Captain Kidd.

These books are geared for kids from the 2nd to the 5th grade I would say. They are entertaining, imaginative reads that help teach kids about history while being fun to read as well. Some have commented that the writing, technically speaking is weak. That may be in some spots but I feel this is mostly intentional as they are writing for 6 - 10 year olds.

These books are really a joy to read and I loved reading them along with my son. I'm glad we saved them!

Good for begining reading, grades 1 and 2

This is probably the best series to get your kid (late 1st through early 3rd grades) launched into reading chapter books. They come in sets of 4, usually focused around a theme such as needing to recover 4 books in ancient history for King Arthur's library, find one book in each adventure. But kids don't seem to get involved with these meta-plots and so the books stand on their own as simply written adventure stories.

Over time, it gets a bit formulaic and thin: Tree house appears, travel in time, get threatened by somebody/something, escape with magical help, return home. Still, your kid will be good for at least 10 books. I'd skip the earlier ones since the later are somewhat better written/produced.

Great stories, poorly written...

Ok, I'll say up front that these are great stories for kids to read. I've been reading them to my 4 year old for some time, and the pace, characters, and action are all perfectly suited. Each of these books grabs his interest and makes him excited about reading more.

The problem I've got with the series is the author's skillset with the language. Some folks may want to overlook this based on the content alone; I feel this view is simple and potentially detrimental to the child. For lots of kids these are first readers, and help develop a child's view of language structure. They're going to start off mimicking the writing 'style' the see; in the case of these books, they'll be seeing a lot of poorly defined (or non-defined) paragraphs, sentence fragments, and grammatical errors. They'll be seeing poorly written examples that will help establish the basis of bad writing habits which may take a lot of work to erase. Whoever edited these books needs a new career.

That said, we skip around the series quite a bit. The latest books are comparatively excellent as far as language mechanics. There's a definite progression in writing *quality* throughout the series, and content is high for all. I just wish Pope-Osborne had taken a creative writing class or two in the beginning.

If you're reading these books to/with your child, you can do some on-the-fly editing. If your child has enough language skill to spot the mistakes, they'll be fine. Otherwise, you might want to proceed with a little caution, or skip ahead in the series.