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Thank you so much for comparing the two! It is so helpful to have someone compare Abeka with The Reading Lesson or really any other phonics program. This helps me to make my decision, since Abeka is all I have used. How has it gone just using the Handbook?

blessedmommyof4 wrote:Thank you for all your helpful advice! Can any of you tell me the approach The Reading Lesson takes for teaching the digraphs. Abeka teaches all these as special sound which the students memorize. The samples of The Reading Lesson on-line only showed the first two lessons, so I could not find out how they teach more difficult concepts such as digraphs. Any insight concerning this would be a great help to me. Thank you!

The digraphs we have experienced so far - th, sh, are taught as "sounds" to be learned and the notation in the child's reading is that the two letters in a digraph are underlined - there is a line under each sound the child sounds out in a word on the page (this is how they get around some that have silent letters, those are not underlined). But these notations are actually dropped very quickly and I have had to remind my DD several times of "sh," she will start sounding out the s and the h and I will say "remember s-h together have a special sound." After the initial pages of the lesson where you practice the new sounds for that lesson, you read a bunch of words that have those sounds (usually the new sounds are the starting sounds, unless they are vowels), then short phrases/sentences, then stories.

Since I haven't used Abeka I can't compare them specifically but I will say that what you saw in the sample lessons of TRL shows that a lot of your time is spent reading, not as much in drilling sounds. The practice is in the doing. By lesson 3-4 you do a few pages of drilling things, but then you move right into reading short phrases/sentences and then short stories. I like this, even though it's still repetitious its more interesting. My DD also gets into telling her dad about what she has read that day (how many times can he listen to the same story about the cat that wants to eat the fish.... thankfully he's a patient man).

I hope this is helpful.