Customer Reviews

McGuffey's Eclectic Primer, Revised Edition

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

My kids were trying to read at toddler age. But trying to teach them with those commercial "I can read" books were impossible. They were distracted by the pretty pictures and would try to improvise and guess at words by looking at the pictures. Also, words like 'turtle' and 'trouble' are not first reader words.

But with this primer, the pictures are pretty but subtle and so the only thing left for the child to concentrate on are the words. Each section, which is one page each, starts with a small group of words to learn, some are memorizing words like "the" and some they can sound out like "cat." Then they take those words and read small paragraphs using those words. The following sections introduce more words and use those and previous words in the paragraphs. It's a very progressive thing and takes about 5 - 10 minutes per page so your child can read a section, run off to play and read another one the next day. It works and it is exciting hearing them read.

Last fall, we borrowed the Hooked on Phonics from a neighbor, and saw limited results with my 5 yr old son. BUT, I thought, some progress is better than none, so I begged my mother to buy Hooked on Phonics for Christmas. She didn't. I thought she was just being cheap by giving him a McGuffey Primer, but I have seen my son FLY through the lessons. He is reading with comprehension and retaining the words better than I ever could have imagined. Hooked on Phonics was just too colorful, included too much media (little books, big books, stickers, CDRoms, videotapes, etc.) and was, I don't know, just so HECTIC feeling. With these readers, we sit together on the couch, my son is able to go at his own pace, and have a real sense of accomplishment in just a 5-10 minute lesson. And he has an interest in reading *outside* of the lessons, also, which he didn't have before. I ENCOURAGE YOU to purchase this reader, as well as the entire set, since when you have one, you'll want them all.

BTW- *My son* asked Grandma for the next McGuffey reader for his birthday. Pretty cool, huh?

Originally Attracted to the McGuffey readers for the novelty of it, I bought the Primer shortly after my first child was born. I read it myself, thought the pedagogy sound--particularly the writers' decision to avoid allowing children to use pictures to "guess" the words--and I came to appreciate the simplicity and clarity of the short lessons. While I use many other beginning reader books to help teach my five-year-old daughter to read, we have been working through the McGuffey Primer and loving it, primarily because the lessons are short enough to keep my daughter's attention and to allow her to feel at the end of each lesson that she has accomplished something.

I particularly appreciate the "Reviews" that come after each set of four or five lessons. No pictures means that the child must entirely depend on her/his memory of the words from previous lessons and on phonetics in order to make her/his way through the review.

One slight drawback would be that for some of the lessons, the story line is not clear enough to catch the child's attention. On some occassions, my daughter reads all the words, but she fails to comprehend the lesson's meaning. This is rare, but more modern readers do a better job of making their stories engaging enough that the child forgets how "hard" it is to read, and instead races through the book to find out what happens.

Nonetheless, I think that parents who are serious about teaching their children to read and who understand the value of supplementing their child's school curriculum, will appreciate the Primer and subsequent titles in the McGuffey series. At the same time, they will expose themselves and their children to a bit of Americana!

I bought this book for my 6 year old who is having some trouble learning to read. I love the book for its simplicity. The first couple of pages show the alphabet letters with the uppercase letters on one page and the lowercase letters on the other. My son has really enjoyed using those two pages to learn letter recognition. Then come the reading pages, and each page gets progressively more difficult as you go along. The black and white illustrations are simple and enjoyable but not distracting. Each page has a short lesson with letters and short words shown at the top of the page and sentences using the letters and words down below. My son has enjoyed trying to find the letters/short words from above in the sentences below. The earlier lessons use simple words such as cat and rat, but the lessons do get more complex as you continue along. I have enjoyed teaching my son some new vocabulary words with this book also as some of the older words are used such as lad instead of boy and nag instead of horse. The book is small and easy for a child to hold. This book is well worth the small investment, and I look forward to moving on to the other McGuffy's Readers as my son progresses.

I just downloaded the Kindle edition to my iPad. It is a garbled version of the FREE Gutenberg Project transcription, which looks like an automated scan to text version.
No illustrations. "Typewriter" font, not the beautiful fonts claimed for the print version. It is not formatted to the page but just runs on like a webpage. (This is unfortunate because the original apparently had vocabulary lists above the text on the same page.)
There are misspelled words, typos, page headers and footers interspersed in the text, even strings of random characters.

I'm an educated adult and I can barely figure it out--I wouldn't think of giving it to a child!

I must say I'm disappointed, because I believe Kindle technology, with dictionary lookup and text-to-speech, could be a major advantage for beginning readers.

I grew up learning how to read with these books. I am now 30 and have a four year old son. We have used the Leapster reader which has made picking up a book fun for him, but it hasn't helped really teaching him how to read. Mostly he just likes listening to the pen tell the story. I completely forgot about these books until a few weeks ago. My mother always said "teach your children how to read when they are ready" I know 4 is early for some but he loves it and is learning very quickly how to identify words and sound out letters. It is a wonderful thing to have your four year old son pass up a video game for a book. With illiteracy rate so high in this country, I don't understand why they don't just use these books. By the way I come from a very diverse multi racial multi religious family and someone had posted, on one of these comments, that these books were not culturally diverse enough. That's ridiculous, when your teaching a child how to read the likely hood the subject of race will come up is very slim. As they get older and can identify certain things, than of course begin to include whatever you sociocultural preference in their reading. My son is Mexican, Native American, African American and white, he really doesn't care what the characters look like.

I was amazed when I sent my son to school and heard about "sight" words......memorizing is NOT reading!! It is important that your children learn phonics so they can sound out unfamiliar words and read alone and confidently! I learned how to read at 5 out of these books and I started teaching my son how to read shortly after he turned 5. We started in Sept. when he started Kindergarten, it is now January and we have just finisher the Primer. He is reading at school ahead of all the other kids and in between a first and second grade level! He now tries to sound out everything and read new material by himself with little help! I was amazed how fast he picked up reading with this book. If you just do a few lessons a night (review the last one or two and then do a new one) you will be amazed at how fast your child will pick this up! Each lesson starts with a few new words at the top, and then a few sentences that include these words. The words themselves have pronunciation marks above them so once you child learns them they can get more confident in sounding out new words with little or no help. So pleased with this book! I now buy the first few for all my friend's when their kids start reading and they have all been pleased as well!

I have purchased this book and the others in the series because of the timeless teaching tool that it is. I wish schools would go back to this book. I myself learned from these books because I was in a private school and I remembered this fact in the attempts to find a good teaching tool for my own son.

The next best thing is Abeka books if you can get your hands on them. My grandmother taught 3 year olds for years and she would start children every year with the tools in this book. I am so glad I found them in stock at Amazon. Every parent should buy them for their children. There is no better textbook available and the method is tried and true.