Stanley the stegosaurus is the first of five early reading books that feature dinosaurs. These books are intended to follow on from the initial word recognition games in the book 'Learning to Read is Child's Play. They are designed to enable the transition from single-word identification to reading in connected text using simple sentences. These books have been tried and tested with many children over the years. For some inexplicable reason, children love dinosaurs. Research and experience demonstrate that very young children find it easier to distinguish between long words such as dinosaur names (like stegosaurus and triceratops) than words such as 'then' or 'there'. The books include large printed individual words of all the text at the back of the book that can be used in games to aid initial word identification. There are also suggestions for fun activities to use these words provided in the book. There are also a couple of line drawings at the back of the book that children can colour in. The vocabulary in this first book consists of just nine words, of which four are nouns (two proper nouns), one is a verb, and four are words that can be used to build simple sentences.