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My ds is will be 6 in March. We will be finishing up LHTH in the next couple months and moving on to LHFHG. So I was wondering the best phonics for him "reading made easy", the reading lesson guide" or hooked on phonics. the reason i'm asking I have the HOP program now and we are as far as reading the "AT" words like cat,fat and so on. this seems really "dry" to me. He is not excited when I bring this book out but he is VERY interested in being able to read. I was wondering is all phonics are this boring to kids just learning to read? He loves all other parts of school and still does the HOP but just tells me he don't like it. any ideas for me? is one phonics program better for boys?

What phonics do you us and why?

also we did a reason for handwriting "K" this year what do I go with for LHFHG?

if you have more advice for me that would be good also.

thanks
Tracy

Our family used RME, which worked great and my dd loved doing it. RME has lots of hands-on activities and it incorporates some handwriting in the program in the form of copywork. It is completely scripted and after awhile you should be abe to go through a lesson without using the script, you can also pick and choose which extra activities to use with each lesson or break up the activities over a couple of days. We did two to three lessons a week and my dd was ready for real books long before we finished the program. I can't say whether RME is better suited for boys than "the reading lesson", but I do know that it is effective and inexpensive, my recommendation would be to buy the physical book, because printing out the pages can be time consuming and frustrating. An added bonus is that there are workbooks available for this program; I wish I could have used them with my dd.

As to your question concerning handwriting, you could buy the next book in the "reason for handwriting" series or if you use RME you could use the built-in copywork and maybe the memory verses from LHFHG for handwriting.

HTH!

We've been using The Reading Lesson with my ds for 6 months (he turned 5 in October) and it's been great for us. You can download the first couple of lessons at their website to try it out at readinglesson.com You can choose how many pages you do for a lesson, which helps tailor it to your dc a bit. My son too was enthusiastic to learn to read but didn't want to read through the lesson, even though I knew he could easily do it. We've been working on him just reading one page with a good attitude (it's so short and doable my dh and I feel it's reasonable to expect cheerful obedience) and now (halfway through the book) he's started asking to do more, and suddenly realized he can read some of our "real" books, like Bears on Wheels and Hop on Pop. It's feeding his enthusiasm and confidence and not a struggle anymore! The Reading Lesson is set up very simply, no prep work. The stories are short with cute pictures and my ds loves to look throught the book at the ones coming up. We'll definitely use it again with our dd when she's a bit older. There's also a CD-rom for related games, but we haven't tried it. I particularly like that you can do handwriting separately from the reading. We've been doing cursive first, but I know lots of people enjoy the Reason for Handwriting series that HOD recommends. We also really enjoyed the Singapore Earlybird Kindergarten 2A and 2B books for math and are now starting the Singapore Primary 1A book. HTH

My son turned 6 in October. we started LHFHG last October and are finshing it up now. He is now in the emerging reader . we had a break between the phonics program and emerging reader where we jsut got books at the library at his level and read.

we used Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons. i knew alot of people who used it and liked it so i looked into it. i was able to check it out of my library before deciding to use it. reading how it works really helped me to understand what i would have to do to make it work for my son. after a while, my son and i, both knew what our parts were and we would flow right thru it. it seems like it starts out slow but once you start getting to the part where you are reading a few sentences it keeps building upon that and has cute little stories. my son loved doing his phonics lessons. We didn't do the "writing part " exactly as it said because we were already practicing handwriting and my son knew all his letters already.

Personally, i never used a Handwriting book. my kids have just practiced on a dry erase bored for the most part. right now i have my son do one page at a time out of his Spiderman Handwriting book. i got it at the Dollar store and each page has one letter uppercase and lowercase and afew words. also has all the letters on one page to trace. We do copy work, too. Just about anything can be copywork. we do handwriting or copywork 2x a week and sometimes 3. I also printed out a copy of printed letters on a chart and posted it by our school area. that way if anyone gets stumped by a letter they just look up to refresh their memory.


Jenn D.

The Reading Lesson is great for boys, as it is short and sweet and yet clips along at a nice doable pace. He would be doing phonics about 15 minutes a day or so. There is a neat optional computer CD to go along with it that he'd probably enjoy and would do a nice job of reinforcing the work he'd done that day. You can always add BOB books to it later if you want some good, inexpensive readers later. Then, when you finish that, if you think he needs one more year of phonics, you could do Reading Made Easy. Though I do think HOP is a good phonics program, I wouldn't continue with HOP if you're feeling it's an uphill battle with ds. Both The Reading Lesson and Reading Made Easy are excellent programs, so either one would work well. And of course, there are even more phonics programs out there too - but I'd suggest doing The Reading Lesson along with the CD (if possible), and then if another year is needed, doing a year of Reading Made Easy next. HTH!

As far as handwriting, when we finished "A Reason for Handwriting K", we did "A Reason for Handwriting A" next. My ds loved writing the Bible verses that went with that and often sent them to relatives. HTH!

In Christ,
Julie