After hearing rave reviews from many homeschooling parents about Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons, I checked the book out of the library, thinking how wonderful it would be if, a hundred days from now, I could have my four-year-old reading like a second-grader. And my son was excited about reading too. Well, suffice it to say that this program isn't for everybody. My son became incredibly bored with the program very quickly. And I mean VERY quickly. In less than five lessons, I had to resort to bribery to get him to sit down and do it with me. I told myself that there's a lot of footwork in the beginning, and once he learns to recognize words and gets into the actual reading, it would get a little more interesting. But it wasn't long before even the bribes weren't worth the twenty minutes. We abandoned the whole thing after eleven lessons. He was doing very well with it, it was just such a drag, and I don't want him to hate reading before he learns how. So, can anyone suggest a phonics program that's actually, you know, fun? I found Phonics Pathways at the library, and I'm going to give that a try, but I'm open to suggestions.
We used The Reading Lesson. Simple, painless, and it didn't require tons of charts and repetitious chanting of sounds. No flashcards, no chanting, not charts, completely painless...
100 Easy Lessons gave me nightmares and I never even tried to ruin my kids lives with it. For one of mine we used Explode the Code and the Sonlight grade 1 readers, they work well together, but since we aren't Christian the grade 2 readers wouldn't work for us so we dropped it and just went on a bit with ETC. For my next little one, that didnt' work. We are using Hooked on Phonics. It's working for him well. Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading is good, but my my kids didn't like to look at the big book to read, it was very intimidating to them. I had to write everything out and well that was a ton of work for me so that didn't last long.
I used 100 EZ Lessons with my oldest when she was 4. We did hit a small roadblock somewhere in the middle where we put it aside for a week or so. But, when she finished she had just turned 5 and was waaaayyy above a solid 2nd grade level...she could read anything. And, even to this day (she's almost 21) reading/spelling/writing have been her strongest areas. Soooo....back then 100 EZ was pretty popular, and there wasn't a lot of other fun programs out there. I did try it with my 2nd child, because it worked so well with the first, but it totally flopped with my son. I remember it was something to do with covering over the picture. He would guess in his mind what the picture was and when he had to read the sentences he just put the words in that he thought were it. If a picture was a of a cat on a rug...he wanted it to be a pig in a bus...so that's how he read it. Grrrr...this child (young man I should say) still can frustrate me! Well, I have used countless phonics programs (well, ok...I could count them but you don't even wanna know ). I have several favorites: Alphabet Island, Astronauts to Zippers, McRuffy Color Phonics K, and one that has little bells and whistles and which ended up being one I really like is Reading Made Easy (I actually have this for sale).
Could it be your son isn't ready to read? I used 100 easy lessons and my son (#4) liked it a lot AND we reached a road block and he couldn't move on. We switched to Explode the Code (workbook) and he LOVED it but again, he couldn't move on to blending words together. I finally gave up and we worked on remembering the letters names and sounds and writing the letters. Finally (after a 3 month break) he is blending words together. This kid just turned SIX. I had something similar happen with my oldest and I believed it was me and my teaching and I gave up trying to teach my 3 older kids to read. They were sent to public school. It turns out my oldest wasn't ready to read until he was 6. (And BTW he advanced very quickly from there. To not being able to read at all to reading Magic Tree House books by himself in a couple of months.) It baffles me because I was an early reader, I read at 4. My mom didn't even "teach" me, I figured it out myself. However not one of my boys have figured out reading before 5-6. (I was so sure #4 would too. He knew all the sounds and letters at 4.) I'm not sure it is the curriculum, the blending of letters into words is a "milestone" your child has to get to, all the pushing in the world ins't going to get him there faster. Pushing will make reading less fun. Reading Milestones Website
100 Easy Lessons was a nightmare for me, too. We also used Explode the Code. I agree that your son may just not be ready though. If he's eager, I'd try something else. If not, I'd do a lot of reading to him.
I think we made it to lesson 4 in Teach your Child To Read. We switched to Explode the Code workbooks and my daughter reads very well.
When DGS was 4 he begged me to teach him to read. 100EZ was within arm's reach, so we started that. We got to lesson 12, then we dropped it in favor of just more read-alouds.
I would suggest that you should look for a reading program which allows children to complete lessons at their own pace so that if a child needs to revise what they have learnt in a particular lesson, they are able to repeat the lesson as many times as they wish. One of the most common difficulties children encounter when learning to read is the failure to understand the alphabetic principle, that is, how written spellings represent the sounds of words. Phonics games help children develop the confidence and understanding with phonics they need to be successful readers. However, Playing phonics games alone is never a substitute for children reading books. Phonics games are very effective when combined with reading as this gives children the opportunity to put into practice all the phonics skills they have learnt.
My boys have all learned to read with a combination of Starfall (a really excellent, FREE online phonics-based program) and LeapFrog's learn to read program. The LeapFrog program isn't available in stores anymore, they discontinued their LeapPad system right around the time my oldest was starting kindergarten. I found the three levels of the reading program really cheap on clearance at the time, and bought it, not knowing what a great program it was. For a preschooler/kindergartener, though, I can't recommend Starfall enough. Also, if you happen to know an elementary school teacher who has a Raz Kids account, it's a great reading practice program. It's pricey to buy it ($99/year), but my SIL's school buys it for their classrooms, and she just adds my kids as though they're one of her students and we can access it from home.
We used this with my youngest when she was 5.. It was a chore to do it, but we got it done.. We didn't do it exactly as it was supposed to be done, we tailored it to fit us.. It really worked for her, but not without a LOT of tears.. When she finished it, we took it to the library and donated it as a "good riddance" ceremony.. Never in my life had I been so happy to get rid of a book as I was that one!! And she felt the same!
I also don't like that one! I like Explode the Code and Starfall. My boys learned to read very, very well by the time they were 4, and that's all they ever used. They both did it on their own, because it was so fun (minus the writing in ETC, of course... they weren't writing at that time... just reading the workbooks and sometimes circling answers or doing them orally).
I LOVE progressive Phonics. I have used Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading and Hooked on Phonics and 100 easy Lessons and only got on to Progressive phonics with my 5th child, and love it more than the rest. I gave everything else away in fact. AND, it is free. I had heard of it before and never bothered to look because I figured anything free cannot be that great. But, it is!
I tried 100 Easy Lessons and absolutely HATED it from the start. We also tried the Reading Lesson and Alphaphonics and neither of those were great (for us) either. So we went on to Explode the Code, and while my son is not thrilled about it (he's not really thrilled about anything school related unless it's science or history) it HAS been the most effective for us thus far.
I tried DGS on Starfall, when he was like 4/5 (living with us at the time), after having tried the 100EZ debacle, and he liked watching the letter sounds videos (particularly Z ZigZag Boy), and playing some of the little games, but had no interest in moving on into the small stories and such. So I just waited until he was back with us again for first grade and we did Christian Light's Learning to Read, which worked just fine. This year I've tried We Learn Letter Sounds from Rod & Staff, with my SN4thgrader, and it is working quite well too. I chose R&S because it gets all the phonics/spelling, reading, Bible, and some English too (capitals, end punctuation, some few concepts), all in one course -- very time-efficient! WLLS also has some handwriting, alphabetical order, and "art" (how to color). I made some extra handwriting sheets out of his Bible lessons which are oral, too. The course is made for kindergarten, first grade, or remedial, so it was tailor-made for him. We're about to finish it, so we'll pick up the R&S first grade shortly, with the same idea: Bible, reading, phonics/spelling, and some English concepts, all in the same course.
We used Alpha-Phonics. I'm not familiar with 100 EZ lessons though, so maybe their similar. Not the most fun thing in the world. And of course, we didn't just use Alpha-Phonics by itself. And never got past lesson 18 or 20 cuz by then they were reading. Along with Alpha-Phonics we used Bob books, We Both Read books, and tons of reading aloud. But phonics doesn't work all the time so I also taped words onto objects, and used my word monster. The word monster is just a cereal box that has a hole cut out of the front for its mouth. Covered the cereal box, added jagged teeth to the inside of the hole, and the child drew a monster face on it, and made slips of paper with sight-words on them. If the child read the word correctly, they got to "feed the monster" by putting the paper into the mouth. Also, used cards that matched the capital letter with the lower case letter. Also, one of mine just didn't learn at age 4 like the others did. Oh well. I tried not to pressure and just kept reading aloud. (She's reading just fine now.)
