Homeschool Friday - Brent's Bot

Homeschool Friday is a feature here at Somewhere Only We Know that showcases books my family reads during homeschool and provides a mini-review/review for each.

Brent's Bot

By: Tessa Greene

Publication: November 1, 2021 by The Good and the Beautiful

61 pages

Genre: Children's, Level 1, Early Reader

Source: Own

( Goodreads )

Description--What would you do if you were stuck inside on a rainy day? If you were Brent, you would make a robot pal! Join Brent and Bot as they learn how to play, take turns, and have fun.

Brent's Bot is published by The Good and the Beautiful which is the company we get a lot of our homeschool curriculum from. This book isn't a part of their curriculum, but I did purchase it as an extra reader for my kids. It is 61 pages long which is about twice the length of level-1 or step-1 reader from companies like Scholastic, Penguin, Random House, etc. The Good and the Beautiful lists Brent's Bot as a Level 1B reader for readers halfway through the level-1 language arts curriculum.

I like that this book is longer than an average level-1 reader. My son needs to get used to reading longer books. Although, I did let him break this book into 2 sessions/days. It has a list of "challenging words" at the beginning so you can go over these words with your child before coming upon them in the story. This helps the child to be somewhat familiar with them and hopefully won't have to break the flow of the story to stumble over a difficult word. These words weren't ones that my son struggled with though.

The story is basically that Brent is sad because it's raining outside and he has no one to play with. A lot of the activities he'd like to do require a second player. His mom acknowledges his sadness and asks him if there's something they can think of to do in order to have fun. Brent comes up with the idea of making his own robot. Brent worked on building his robot for three days. Eventually, Brent shows his mom his creation and takes the robot to play all of the activities that Brent couldn't do alone.

I love that there are multiple lessons we can learn from this short story. We can learn empathy with how Brent's mom handles his sadness. We can learn to use our imagination and create something new out of something old (recycling). We can see that hard work is necessary to achieve Brent's goal. And then we can see the satisfaction of hard work paying off. We can also learn about problem-solving. Brent could have whined about not being able to do all the fun things he wanted to do, but he chose to solve his problem instead.

If you can get all that (and probably more) from a 61-page level 1B reader.... Man! That sounds like a 5 Star book to me. Not to mention that my son actually enjoyed reading this book. He really liked studying the pictures and seeing how the robot was made. Have you read Brent's Bot? What did you think? Let me know!

P. S. You don't have to buy homeschool curriculum from The Good and the Beautiful in order to shop their bookstore. I have been pleased with all of our purchases so far. Check out their website if you're looking for stories with a moral for young readers.