Review: Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons

I thought I'd do a quick review of the early reading program that I did with my 4 year old this past summer. We went through the book called "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons", and completed it in probably just over 4 months. 

To aid her in keeping interested and driven to finish each lesson fully, we did a simple sticker system. It was set to do 100 days in a row, but we ended up taking a month vacation in the middle (and it was VERY hard to pick back up when we returned, but we did actually do all 100 lessons!)

To sum up my review... I WHOLEHEARTEDLY ENDORSE this book! It is such a great tool and teaches children in a truly interesting way and is totally phonics-based, which I love. 

Now, to be honest, we didn't do it entirely as the directions say. Since we were doing it at such a young age, I did not stress her being able to sound out words in her head by he end of the book. We still sounded everything out loud and did not read through every story twice, as the directions asked. This was just our first, crash-course in phonics and reading and we treated it as such.  I didn't expect us to finish it at the first or second-grade reading level. I just wanted the basic phonics to be mastered and for the beginning of sounding out words to be in place. And this product delivered that excellently.

Some details about it that I loved:

1. It is TOTALLY teacher friendly. It actually tells you exactly what words to say when teaching. It also does a GREAT job of teaching the teacher how to properly say and teach sounds so that the student does not get confused or improper phonics.

2. From Day 1 the students are reading. This is both encouraging to the teacher and the student.

3. The lessons are short. The book says that lessons should be able to be finished in about 20 minutes a day. It took us longer than this often, but I was working with a young student.

4. A basic hand-writing course is also built in to the daily lessons. Awesome!

Some things I didn't care for:

Umm.... can't think of any. Seriously, I can't!

So... check it out! I will DEFINITELY be using it for all of my kids to introduce phonics and probably again a year or two later as a refresher if they need it.

-Maria