education

When my husband and I decided to homeschool, we looked at a lot of different curriculums and found one that we thought was just the best thing on the face of the earth. It was $285 for about a year and a half worth of books. After four months of repetitive drills for over an hour each day, my son and I both hated school time.He just didn't see the point of all of those blends he had to repeat over and over. And with a two year old and a two month old I had trouble staying encouraged to do it. Then my friend introduced me to this book. Her daughter who is 1 year and 7 months younger than my son was on lesson 40 and doing wonderfully. I headed straight to the store. By lesson 13 (which was just day 4 for us because of the foundation that took 4 months to lay) when he read his first sentence he was totally hooked. FINALLY all those letters meant something. We usually did 2-3 lessons a day. We have completed the book and he is now reading wonderfully and loving it. Our other curriculum hasn't left the shelf since. This will be our phonics curriculum for teaching all of our children. It alone was worth $300.

My son started attending phonics lessons when he turned 3-1/2 years old. He coped well with the single sounds but when the class moved on to three-letter words, he just couldn't do it and he totally lost interest in learning to read. So when I first got this book, he simply refused to try it (note: this book is quite useless unless the child wants to learn). I was finally able to motivate him with some fun stickers that he sticks on the pages after he completes each task. He was a lot more receptive to the methods presented in the book. We progressed quite smoothly, repeated some of the later lessons which were harder. It has been five months and my son is just over 4 years old. Not only is he able to read, this capability has strongly boosted his self-esteem and he enjoys reading.

This book has aided me in one of the most rewarding experiences in parenting so far. I started teaching my 4 yr old to read without any guidance and found myself misleading him. This book helped me teach him clearly and covered many aspects of reading I hadn't anticipated such as reading comprehension and punctuation. We spend good quality time together and to keep it interesting I find myself coming up with creative ways of keeping it fun. This is probably the best buy I have ever made for my child. He is reading extremely well now and will be more than prepared for kindergarten.