I should stop trying to figure out what to do with my son because he can obviously fend for himself. We traveled so much last month that I made zero progress looking into the next steps to help my son (2 years 6 months) move toward reading. The most I managed to do was download the Starfall Learning to Read app. My son flew through the phonetic exercises with zero mistakes and wasn't interested anymore.

I went out of town on Monday and got back Thursday morning. At some point in those few days he made another leap. This morning he read my shirt by sounding it out. He has spent the day spelling words using phonetics rather than letters and when we were running errands in the car he was back there sounding out a book.

I wouldn't call this fluent reading at all but it's definitely progressing. He also seems to have made another language jump and is now using much more complex sentences.

He has also started counting backwards which is totally new and I've heard him counting past 100 a couple times recently.

I'm absolutely certain my child is smarter than me. As always I never really quite know what to do with him other than keep playing. It seems to be working out just fine so far.

I would like some suggestions for books because I have heard the BOB books are boring. Is there another series that is like those books I should look into for my son?

We have the Brand New Reader series (the monkey series and bear series were popular for DS, and he hated the BOB books but he loved the Brand New Reader series).

After that, DS loved the Mo Willems books (the Pigeon ones and the Elephant and Piggie ones).

None of my kids would read Bob books. They're not just boring, the illustrations are terrible line drawings.

Some classic Seuss titles like Hop on Pop are good for new readers. My daughter really liked The Big Fat Cow that Goes Kapok as one of her early readers. There was also a collection of books with good illustrations that we liked-- I can't remember it now-- but a good book store will have a lot of fun titles for an emerging reader.

FWIW, 2 1/2 was when my oldest started reading words all over town. He was barely two when he read "CAT" on some construction equipment, and realized there were words everywhere he looked. It was so fun to see him figure that out. He could read books by 3 1/2, and started on Magic Treehouse by his 4th birthday. You probably need to get a library card for him soon!