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We have just stated LHFHG with all intentions of using Abeka K5 phonics. However, I am very disappointed with it so far. Which curriculum is better, the Reading Made Easy or The Reading Lesson? My daughter knows most of her sounds and is reading to start blending.

Thanks!
Teresa

Teresa,

There are SOO many phonics choices out there, it can make you kinda dizzy trying to choose. I totally understand! I decided to use The Reading Lesson with Allison, and we are both totally enjoying it. We did decide to get the CD with it, and she really likes playing the games on there (and they do a great job reinforcing the lesson ).

Here's a past thread with a question similar to yours. Carrie did a great job comparing Reading Made Easy and The Reading Lesson. viewtopic.php?f=6&t=3931

Hope that helps!
Kathleen

we used Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons.my son just finished it and is reading at almost 2nd grade level. i am having him practice his reading with books from library in the easy reading section. the phonics book doesn't last for all of a LHFHG year if you do it 5 days a week. that is why we are practicing before we jump into the emerging reader. we have bee very satisfied
Jenn D.

I used 100 EZ Lessons several years ago with dd#1. However, it wasn't something I knew dd#2 would work well with. We've been using The Reading Lesson, and it works great. They are very similar, but the script for the parents in 100 EZ lessons would be too distracting for dd#2. I needed cleaner looking pages for her. We didn't opt for the cd-rom...which might have been nice to do. I have a subscript to Click 'n Read, which is nice, but is too repetitive and bores dd so we don't really use it.

Hi! I was the one that asked a similar question to yours in the thread Kathleen posted for you!
We ended up choosing The Reading Lesson- & we really like it!! You can sit down & cuddle on the couch with your child- there is not prep- & it's very clean & neat.
Hope this helps.

I wanted to second the recommendation for Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons by Siegrield Englemann. We'd used it since January with my 4 year old. She already knew all her letter sounds when we started. We went real slow to start with doing just a couple tasks (subparts of a full 20ish minute lesson) a day until we worked up to doing a full lesson. I did about 1 lesson a week with doing it a second time at the end of the week. The other days we did tandem reading where I'd point to each word of a sentence and say it. Then she would point to the words and say them after me. Some days, I just had story time with her. She started reading words in May at 4.5. We've continued through the summer and she can read easy reader books. I'm so proud of her!

I love the book to teach reading because you get to snuggle up together and look at it together. No getting up to mess with malnipulatives. They practice rhyming, isolating sounds, blending sounds. Now that she is reading couple sentence "stories", there are reading comprehension questions and finding the word on the page. There is a script so you know exactly what to say and it keeps you from over explaining. I actually don't really say much of anything anymore because she knows what do to for each section. We'd just review it again if she wasn't ready to move on to the next lesson. We have sped up and slowed down as needed. She had trouble saying the "th" sound as in "that" for awhile, but she kept practicing and once she had it, we progressed faster again.

The pages are rather busy as the child is reading the large black text that has the teacher guide in small black text and teacher script in small red text. Everything is all on the same page which I like so I don't have to hunt for anything else or flip pages around. It does crack me up when she starts reading my stuff as in asking "Is this word, such and such." She is definitley reading.

I imagine that most programs get similar results. It's just what teaching style works best for you. My sister-in-law's Kindergarten MFW phonics program works fine for her but it would drive me crazy after being used to a simplistic program. Good luck!