Fast paced and fun. General idea: don't pigeonhole/typecast people.

I actually really liked this one. Though the plush Fly Guy is still terrifying.

380L

Not a fan. My son brought home a Fly Guy book in 1st grade when we were deep in the trenches of losing library books between the library doors and the black hole of a young child’s Family Circus dotted-line style path through life. I don’t remember which book it was, but I remember being pissed about how much I was going to owe the school library when this glorified reader disappeared.

Fly Guy and Pinkalicious fall into the same bottom-scraping category for me. “Boys like bugs!” Write a 100 word book using 1 to 4 letter words about a bug and you’ve got a winner! Do the same thing x50 and you’ve got a highly-profitable franchise! “Girls like the color pink!” Etc... Gag me with a spoon.

I’m still less than thrilled when I see Fly Guy books (usually Flugo, his Swedish translation) in school libraries or my student’s hands. My overly harsh criticism comes from seeing children get stuck at this level, when they should move on to better, more rewarding books. The students who get stuck here are being lauded for reading books as a consumer (Great job! You finished a book!) instead of a reader (You finished a book! Was it exciting? What was your favorite part?).

So why the 3 stars? Eight years on, I’m in a different stage of parenting and haven’t had to pay for lost library books in a few years. Fly Guy and his ilk have their place in reading education. They serve a specific phase well. Namely, giving sounding-out-simple-word level students a desk book that might give a classroom teacher 3 minutes to breathe. Contributing to teacher sanity- 2 stars.

This specific Fly Guy book centers on a fun pun with an onomatopoeia. A book that gives me reason to use my favorite word in the entire English language receives an extra star.

Mother Tongue notes: Because of the series’s popularity and prolific publishing, many students are reading these books in their Swedish translation. It’s a quick and easy trick to pull up the English version on You Tube and have students follow along in the Swedish book in their hands. The earliest readers are able to follow along by matching the illustrations in the video with the book. This makes for a good example of translation between the 2 languages, using a book and story that’s already familiar.

Maybe it's time to start a new catagory---books Aidan reads to me:-)

This was the perfect level of challenge for where he's at now. And he loved Fly Guy...unfortunately to the point where he now "loves" flies in general and was annoyed when I angrily shoo'ed one out of our car yesterday.

I forget who gave us this one--I think it was part of a treat bag from our library, but he picked Super Fly Guy for the next Scholastic order. Hope it's as good!

My favorite book series during 1st grade. I really loved the artwork in this series.

For beginning readers. A good balance of text and pictures.

fly guy was iconic… the amount of these books i read

Funny & cute.