Get Ready for School – Teacher-Approved!

Black Dog Has launched a new format of its best-selling Get Ready for School series. These four brand-new, activity-packed paperbacks give kids a head start in skills and learning for Pre-K and Kindergarten.

Get Ready for Pre-K: Letters & Sight Words
245 Fun Exercises for Mastering Basic Skills
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Get Ready for Pre-K: Numbers, Shapes & Colors
249 Fun Exercises for Mastering Basic Skills
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Get Ready for Kindergarten: Letters & Sight Words
247 Fun Exercises for Mastering Skills for Success in School
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Get Ready for Kindergarten:Numbers, Time & Opposites
251 Fun Exercises for Mastering Skills for Success in School
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For nearly a decade, the Get Ready for School series has been a staple for parents seeking to prepare their children for the challenges of the upcoming school year. Each title in the series reinforces essential, age-appropriate skills, recognized by educators nationwide, through fun and engaging activities.
Get Ready for Pre-K: Letters and Sight Words includes activities that help kids master the alphabet, phonics, tracing, and important words, such as “I’m sorry” and “please.” Numbers, Shapes & Colors focuses on numbers 1-10, simple math, a rainbow of colors, cutting, and crafts.
Get Ready for Kindergarten: Letters and Sight Words tackles curriculum-based activities including recognizing and writing upper and lowercase letters, days of the week and months of the year, and naming people and places in family and community. Numbers, Time & Opposites includes activities that reinforce numbers 1 through 20; comparing and contrasting; matching numbers to pictures; completing patterns and mazes; telling time; and simple math.
Perforated pages allow kids to tear out pages and work on a few at a time, and to display their completed work on a wall, refrigerator, or bulletin board.
These perfectly portable Get Ready for School books will keep little hands and minds busy anywhere, anytime—at home, in the car, and out and about in waiting rooms and restaurants.

 

Get Ready for School Connecting Cards: Letters is a winner of a 2012 Parents’ Choice Award!

For nearly a decade, the Get Ready for School series has been a staple for parents who want to prepare their children for the challenges of the upcoming school year. Children love the brightly colored activities and the chance to do homework like the “big kids.”

Each title in the series reinforces essential, age-appropriate skills, recognized by educators nationwide, through fun and engaging activities and worksheets. The Get Ready for School series builds confidence and skills so that kids feel prepared on that scary first day of school.

With 320 full-color, teacher-friendly perforated pages in each book (more than any other full-color book in this category) for only $17.95, the Get Ready for School books are a fabulous value! And our new Get Ready for School Connecting Cards sets offer a fun new alternative to learn and play.

Believe it or not, homework can be fun!

Pre-K

GET READY FOR PRE-K prepares kids by teaching them:

  • Trace and draw lines, then write letters and numbers
  • Recognize and draw shapes including a square, circle, rectangle, triangle, and an oval
  • Name all the colors of the rainbow
  • Follow mazes and connect the dots
  • Know the seasons and the weather associated with them
  • Identify family members, people in the neighborhood, food, vehicles, places, and more

Colorful characters, hands-on activities, and lots of room to color and create will keep your child engaged and busy for hours.

Kindergarten

GET READY FOR KINDERGARTEN teaches children to:

  • Write numbers from 1-20 and the letters of the alphabet
  • Count, determine the value of coins, and master simple addition
  • Recognize colors and shapes
  • Spot differences, similarities, and opposites
  • Tell time and the weather

Also included are connect-the-dots, find-the-word puzzles, and lots of fun activities for rainy days.

GET READY FOR KINDERGARTEN: MATH AND SCIENCE helps kids learn to:

  • Recognize, read, and write numbers
  • Count and learn number order
  • Develop addition and subtraction strategies
  • Identify sets, patterns, and shapes
  • Recognize similarities and differences
  • Learn about animal habitats and behavior
  • Understand weather and the seasons
  • Learn about foods and food groups
  • Practice basic science classroom skills like predicting, measuring, and recording observations

GET READY FOR SCHOOL: NUMBERS teaches basic counting and mathematical skills such as:

  • Writing numbers from 1 to 10
  • Counting objects
  • Number recognition
  • Sorting and sequencing
  • Same and different
  • Completing patterns
  • Building graphs
  • Telling time

GET READY FOR SCHOOL: SHAPES AND COLORS teaches basic spatial and other visual skills such as:

  • Tracing and drawing the eight basic shapes (including stars and hearts)
  • Identifying primary and secondary colors
  • Identifying hidden shapes
  • Same and different
  • Big and little
  • Matching pairs
  • What goes together?
  • Completing patterns

GET READY FOR SCHOOL: ACTIVITIES AND GAMES for Kindergartners teaches kids skills such as:

  • Completing the pattern
  • Matching pairs
  •  Following the clues
  • Drawing shapes
  • Learning about prepositions
  • Predicting and graphing
  • Sorting objects into groups
  • Telling time

Memory game cards and congratulatory stickers reinforce the exercises and add to the learning and fun!

GET READY FOR SCHOOL: LETTERS teaches kindergartners the following:

  • Learning to write upper case and lower case letters
  • Identifying beginning and ending sounds
  • Rhyming
  • Completing words
  • Practicing alphabet order
  • Distinguishing letters
  • Matching upper case and lower case letters
  • Completing letter patterns

Also includes 64 additional activity pages as well as a memory game and congratulatory stickers.

GET READY FOR SCHOOL: MAZES AND PUZZLES reinforces basic early-learning skills for kindergartners like:

  • Finding what’s different
  • Solving four different kinds of mazes
  • Writing and identifying letters
  • Writing numbers from 1 to 10
  • Learning alphabet order
  • Identifying opposites
  • Distinguishing shapes
  • Connecting similar objects
  • Identifying the seasons
  • Practicing sequencing

Includes fun activities such as completing patterns, making comparisons, matching pairs, identifying groups, making rhymes, solving hidden pictures, completing mazes, and much more.


First Grade

GET READY FOR FIRST GRADE covers:

  • Master reading and writing of both letters and numbers
  • Understand vowels, consonants, letter combinations—and start to read!
  • Recognize color combinations and shapes that make up our world
  • Spot differences, similarities, and opposites
  • Complete challenging math and counting problems
  • Understand basic science, nature, and geography

Connect-the-dot pictures, find-the-word puzzles, and lots of other brain-teasing exercises are also included.

GET READY FOR FIRST GRADE: MATH AND SCIENCE draws the focus in for pre-first-graders to help them learn to:

  • Recognize, read, and write numbers from 1 to 100
  • Count by 2’s, 5’s, and 10’s
  • Identify odd and even numbers
  • Practice addition and subtraction strategies
  • Solve number sentences and word problems
  • Identify and understand basic fractions
  • Learn about money and telling time
  • Identify the characteristics of animal groups
  • Learn about the parts of a plant
  • Use word problems to solve questions about weather and the seasons
  • Identify solids, liquids, and gases
  • Practice basic science classroom skills, such as predicting, observing, and recording data

Includes more than 200 fun and satisfying activities, games, puzzles, and problems to solve. Developed with the input of an educator and tailored specifically to skills and topics covered in first grade classrooms, this book is an indispensable resource for helping kids achieve success in school. Most important, Get Ready for First Grade: Math and Science reinforces that learning about math and science is both fun and rewarding!

NEW ADDITIONS TO THE SERIES!

GET READY FOR FIRST GRADE: SPELLING, WRITING, AND READING builds confidence and skills with activities that help kids:

  • Recognize long and short vowels
  • Silent words
  • Action words
  • Contractions
  • Adjectives and adverbs
  • Singular and plural
  • Word families
  • Opposites
  • The parts of a sentence
  • Sight words
  • Proper names…and more!

GET READY FOR SECOND GRADE covers:

  • Reading
  • Writing complete sentences
  • Counting by 2’s, 5’s, and 10’s
  • Adding and subtracting
  • Shapes and measurements
  • Time and money
  • Weather
  • Basic world geography
  • The solar system…and more


What do parents have to say about the Get Ready for School series?
GET READY FOR SCHOOL CONNECTING CARDS

Fun, colorful, and teacher-approved, these connecting cards let kids create their own words, sentences, and equations in endless combinations.

Get Ready for School Connecting Cards are the perfect portable companion to Black Dog & Leventhal’s Get Ready for School series. Each set contains 36 sturdy, double-sided, full-color cards in a bring and fun case built for little hands. The cards are designed with tongue-and-groove notches at either end so they can connect together in any combination a child can imagine.

GET READY FOR SCHOOL CONNECTING CARDS: LETTERS contains the entire uppercase alphabet on one side of the cards, with the lowercase letters on the opposite side, plus additional cards with the most commonly used letters so kids can combine them to create words or even their name.

GET READY FOR SCHOOL CONNECTING CARDS: NUMBERS includes numbers 1 through 20 in numerical form on one side and spelled out as words on the opposite side. Also included are +, -, and = cards so kids can create equations or multiples.

GET READY FOR SCHOOL CONNECTING CARDS: PRE-K SIGHT WORDS and KINDERGARTEN SIGHT WORDS help kids recognize the most commonly used words in the English language, such as “the,” “to,” “and,” “you,” “it,” “in,” “said,” and “for.” Kids can connect words into short phrases or sentences. Learning to recognize these high-frequency words is an important first step in learning to read.

 

“Excellent prep tool for kindergartners. My 5-year-old is currently in preschool and will start kindergarten in fall. I wanted to get her a couple of supplementary materials to prepare her for kindergarten, especially to work on during the summer break. This is one of the titles I purchased and I’m quite pleased with it.

The book has 270 interactive activities, which cover the alphabet, numbers and counting, colors, shapes, sizes and comparisons, opposites, our world, and nature. The activities are organized thematically and the outstanding feature of this book is its spiral-bound format, which makes it easy to lay out flat on the table for a child to work on, and not having to worry about ripping out pages, and misplacing pages. There are lots of colorful illustrations and those children can color to keep visual learners motivated and engaged in their learning. Highly recommended!”

—Z. Hayes (Texas)

“This book is great tool to have at home, before AND during the duration of your child’s kindergarten year. There are TONS of great worksheets in this book, and its been very fun and useful to help my daughter transition into Kindergarten and to help the learning process during Kindergarten by pulling out activities to do that corresponded w/the what her class was learning during a given week. A++++++”

—N. Bergren

“I am a stay at home mother of a now 6 year old kindergartner. I had decided that I would complete preschool at home with my daughter. This workbook covers lettering, counting, patterns, opposites, weather, our world, shapes, and coloring. My daughter completed this workbook…and has been extremely well prepared for kindergarten. Her teacher has been very pleased with her work in school. She excels in class because she had been introduced to so many activities and concepts by using this workbook. And the best part is everything is organized into one workbook with a great large spiral binding so that the workbook opens flat. I was very happy with this purchase!!!”

—Angela R. Katterheinrich

“I have used this book and the Pre-K book to work with my 4 year old. The colors are vibrant and the pages are not cluttered. A lot of books have too many images on them taking away from the activity. This book provides a wide array of age appropriate activities that can either supplement what your child is learning in school or can be used in place of preschool. I have found this book (as well as the Pre-K one) covers much more than what the typical preschool covers. My child loves it too and will request to work in it.”

—Sheri (New York)

“A great educational tool!…This workbook would also be good for those traveling and wanting to ensure their preschooler doesn’t miss out on anything while on an extended road trip or similar.”

—J. Adams (Portland, Vic., Australia)

“My daughter missed the cut off from kindergarten by just a few days. We got this book to do as “homework” when her big brother does his and she loves it. It has a lot of great concepts and fun activities. We try to do 2-3 pages at night and many times she wants to keep doing more.”

—M. Wood

“I have purchased both this and the Pre-K book. The kids just love them. The spiral binding is what sets this one apart. It just lays flat on the table so they can easily work. I am going to buy another set for my 3-yr old who wants to do ‘homework’ like his kindergarten sister.”

—J. Weaver (Upland, California)

What do teachers think of the Get Ready for School series?
“This book is wonderful. I use it every morning during circle time with my pre-kindergarten students and they just love it. I see them using it quite often during free time!”

—Kara M. Rohrbaugh