Customer Reviews

Teaching Reading at Home and School: A Step by Step Guide to Foundational Language Arts

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

 

 

Mrs. Sanseri has done teachers (especially those of us who homeschool) a great favor by making phonics instruction in the Spaulding method accessable to everyone. My daughter started this program at 5 years old, and within months she was reading at a second grade level! Her penmanship is also very pretty, and she looked forward to new spelling words every week. We also tried "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" and found it was too simple for my 5-year-old, but perfect for my 3 year old who wasn't ready to hold a pencil yet. Buy both books (especially if you have more than one child) and determine what kind of instruction your child best responds to.

The step by step lessons are very useful and will be of great help to anyone trying to implement WRTR at home. However, some of the material is not as organized as it could be, which makes some of the lessons a bit difficult to follow. There is certainly room for improvement in future editions. Nevertheless, this book is a good investment.

I was first trained in the Spaulding Method about 20 years ago. With the new understanding of phonics and phonemic processing as essential to good reading skills, it provides and excellent, inexpensive introduction to reading instruction for those unfamiliar with the phonics approach.

Material lacks the organization it could have. The Spelling to Read and Write & the W.I.S.E. Guide to Spelling by this author is a replacement for Teaching Reading & a wiser investment.

If you want to use the Writing Road to Reading program, then you NEED a companion guide to break it down. There are several out there, but I chose this one after several recommendations from friends who use it currently. It's just what it advertises itself to be: A Step-by-Step Guide to Foundational Language Arts. It covers everything from the six basic handwriting strokes to scope and sequences with step-by-step implementation to spelling rules and the 70 phonograms "in a nutshell." Easy to use and easy to follow.