Interested in introducing nouns to your 5-7 year old? This may be the book you have been looking for. The Little Books of Nouns is actually a big book packed with activities that make the concept of nouns simple and easy to understand. Using rhymes, it details how to present the idea of a noun to a child. The rhymes included are: "What is a noun", "Nouns Name People", "Nouns Name Place", and "Nouns Name Things". These simple poems use everyday words that are very familiar to young children. There is a section on how to make your own noun poems, followed by brief instructions on how to use the reproducible Little Books.

Also included is a segment that offers some suggested extension activities such as dramatizing a Little Book's story, identifying rhyming words, writing a story as a poem, categorizing nouns, identifying singular and plural nouns and, as a challenge for the older students, and spelling some plural nouns. There are 84 pages of Little Books that you copy and put together with your child as they follow the instructions. The Little Books consist of sentences like "I have crackers." and "I like flowers." Each sentence personalizes the nouns and illustrates how nouns are a part of everyday life. The Little Book titles are: "My Body", "Places I Like", "Things I Like", "Lunch", "The Circus", "My Jobs", "A Party", "At School", "A Pet", "My Plants", "I See Numbers", "Boxes and Boxes", "Workers" and "I See Words". In each book, the nouns are underlined. These underlined words also appear in the last section of the book as word cards. These cards are to cut out and be used as flash cards.

If you have a visual learner, this is a book that will be extremely helpful. It is not marketed for homeschoolers, as you will see in the introduction where it talks about sending a letter home to the parents. However, it is easily adapted to a homeschool setting. This book would be an excellent addition for those who use unit studies or for a child that is struggling to understand nouns.

My hope with this product was that it would make a good supplement to our current, all-inclusive language arts program, but it was too detailed to work as a supplement for us. Our complete program had already addressed many of the concepts that were covered and the repetition was tedious. Nevertheless, it is reasonably priced and would be easy to incorporate as a stand alone language arts unit.

-- Product Review by Annemarie Williams, TOS Prayer Journal Editor, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, March, 2006