Our Sister Sophie is the first of 4 stories in the Sophie Story series for young children. After each story page is read aloud, children tap “blue words” to trigger surprising animations that illustrate a word meaning or cause Wizding letter people to “dance out” the sounds of words. In Sophie Stories, children are introduced to cvc words like “red” and “hen” one sound at a time, to simple sight words, and with “onset and rime,” hearing the first sound of a word split off from the rest of a word, like, “ch-icks, chicks."
In Sophie 1, a purple spotted egg that first appeared in the nest of the angry red hen in the Reader Bee and the Story Tree app is slow to hatch. The chicks wait for this big egg to hatch, along with familiar Reader Bee characters—Angela, Carlos, Joy, the bear and rabbit. Will the big egg ever hatch, and who’s inside—could it be a kitten dragon they name Sophie? There are 3 more Sophie Stories in the series, where Sophie finds out how difficult it can be to be different from the others. This comforting story is suitable for very young children, who can gain from playing with the Blue Words while surprise is blended with pedagogy.
Sophie Stories introduce children to “the alphabetic principle” (that letters make sounds, and sounds gain meaning when they come together to make a word). Sophie Stories also build “phonemic awareness,” learning specific sounds of words. But unlike workbook pages so common in school work, Sophie provides a delightful context for playing with sound. Children like to hear the whole story from beginning to end, then on a second reading, play with the blue words. Many eBooks for children show all the words on a page being spoken, and children ignore the words because “it’s too much new stuff at once." Blue words are another example of Reader Bee lowering the “conceptual load” for children so early reading is fun, because it’s manageable and easy.