My Dox Rex is the fourth book and transition book in the series, which no longer includes within-text supports or prompts. This transition is facilitated by reducing the number of unique words and total words, to help keep confidence strong as these supports are faded. This book retains some predictability of sentence structure, while alternating directions of what to do versus what not to do. The illustrations increase slightly in difficulty again as well, as they become slightly more complex. In this book, the concept of imperative language is introduced in the form of giving commands, and the concept of negation is introduced (what not to do). The difficulty increases in this book with an increased number of kindergarten sight words (it has the most kindergarten sight words of all the books) and introduces a few second grade sight words. This book also introduces exclamation points as punctuation.
The developmental skills highlighted in this book are giving and following directions, using inflection to convey meaning of increased importance, and understanding negation. In addition, self-regulation skills are introduced and modeled here, where the girl remains calm to instruct the dog on what to do and what not to do when he doesn’t always make the right choice.
