The Reading Lesson: Teach Your Child to Read in 20 Easy Lessons (1) (The Reading Lesson series)

This reading program is very intuitive, well laid out and straightforward. After listening to the podcast Sold and Story and looking into research on the Science of Reading, I decided to try to teach my daughter how to read phonetically BEFORE starting Kindergarten.I checked out the book "Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons" from my local library. While it was very informative, the heavy scripting was overwhelming and the pages looked too busy to appeal to my child. After watching a YouTube review comparing 100 easy lessons to The Reading Lesson, I decided to purchase this book. Great decision!My daughter just turned 5 and we are enjoying this book. She loves coloring the pictures after reading the pages. We also put a sticker on each completed page. I will say that my daughter already knew all 26 basic alphabet letter sounds and how to blend CVC words BEFORE starting this program. I highly recommend that first otherwise, this program may move too fast for your kid and cause frustration. They are reading short sentences by the end of lesson 1!As of this initial review we are on lesson 13, so over half way through. Here are some additional tips that I have so far:Supplement with Bob books for additional reading practice. They are inexpensive on Amazon and can be checked out at most libraries.Get some magnetic letter tiles and a small white board. It will help you get through the pages with no pictures. I write one sentence on the white board at a time so it's not overwhelming for my child to look at. The small white board is also an inexpensive way to have your little one practice their handwriting. Have them copy one or two sentences from the lesson. The magnetic tiles are great for pages with word families. Dictate (sound out) the word and have the child spell it with the magnetic letters.The reading lesson introduces the MOST common letter sounds combinations first, this helps get your kid reading real books faster. After lesson 11, I added in the revised Mcguffey primer for additional reading practice and we were both pleasantly surprised that she could decode most of the words in the Mcguffey primer lessons because of what she had already learned from the reading lesson. As of lesson 13 she can also read Green Eggs and Ham and other easy reader Dr. Suess books. You can find the Mcguffey primer for free online and Dr. Suess books can be checked out at your local library. She was very excited to be able to read REAL books!Reward systems:I printed off the lesson progress chart from their website and out it on ourrefrigerator. My daughter enjoys putting a sticker on the chart after completing each lesson. I also implemented prizes for completing lessons 5, 10 etc.We will likely take a break after lesson 15 and just focus on Bob books and reading real books. This book takes kids to a 2nd grade reading level and my kid just turned 5 so there's no rush.

The Reading Lesson is the single best program for teaching children to read I have found to date and I have seen many. I first came accross it while trying to find materials to help my daughter learn to read. My daughter is extremely smart. She is also dyslexic and the way reading is taught in early elementary just did not work for her. As a teacher, I have learned about different ways of teaching, learning and ways to differentiate instruction and I could not understand why no one knew how to work with a child whose brain processed information differently as is the case with people who have dyslexia. I spoke with several colleagues who are SPED teachers and specialists in our school district and was informed that there was no training given to them in how to work with children who had specific reading disabilities such as dyslexia. I decided to find a way. After looking and trying a wide variety of programs, I found the Reading Lesson.It worked. Not only was it simple enough for anyone to use, but the program is built on solid phonics and whole language principles give the best results in the shortest amount of time. The pages are simple and have plenty of white space. This helps simplify reading for children who are unable to see spaces between words and who see letters out of order or inverted. They use phonetic markings but not excessively, and slowly wean the children off of them as the book progresses. Sounds are introduced slowly and in a way that not only makes sense but allows them to begin reading simple sentences from the first lesson. This provides the children with a feeling of success that you simply cannot get any other way. The program also includes a large number of Dolche sight words. The mixture of phonics and whole language is key to achieving fluency and comprehension. It also allows children to move at their own pace, which is extremely important.Years after teaching my daughter to read, I came accross a student who somehow reached third grade without learning how to read despite having had to repeat grades before. The student's self esteem had been severely affected to the point where there was serious danger of psychological damage due to depression. Although I was not the child's reading teacher at the time, I decided to give the program a try. I was not sure which concepts the child had managed to learn through the years and what was missing, so we started the book from lesson one. We worked every day before school for 30 to 45 minutes using the Reading Lesson as our primer and supplementing with other reading material to practice reading from books, as well as the free materials found on the Starfall website. While I was working with the student to re-build the foundation of phonics and sight words found in the Reading Lesson, the reading teacher worked on third grade skills regarding reading analysis using texts appropriate for the student's reading level. In a month the student had made significant progress and had gone from not knowing letters and sounds (pre primer) to beginning to read first grade level texts. The change was also apparent in that the student was participating in class, talking to classmates more and seemed much happier on a daily basis. The student also went from writing complete gibberish when asked to answer questions on paper, to beginning to write actual words with invented spelling based on the phonics the student was learning in the program. The change in the short amount of time was simply amazing. The student continued to progress. While it took time for the student to progress, the foundation provided by the Reading Lesson was key in essentially rescuing a child who had fallen through the cracks and was headed for a very bad future.The Reading Lesson is effective, simple to use, and cost effective. You do not need to be a teacher to use this nor have any specialized knowledge in reading instruction. All you really need is this book to teach your child to read, although the company offers companion programs which are also good (their website has a lot of useful resources). There are also plenty of other resources out there that can be used to complement the Reading Lesson in order to maximize and enrich the learning experience. If you want to help get your child started in reading, or if you have a child who is struggling with reading (particularly decoding words), you may want to give this book a try. It really does work.

I started this book with my son when he was 3 years 2 months old. After just a month with this book, he is able to sound out and read words and simple stories, and we are only on Lesson 6. So, I am now pretty convinced that young children CAN learn to read as long as they are given the right instruction (this book!). As a special educator who has seen tons of reading programs, costing from hundreds to thousands of dollars, I feel that none of them compare to this $18 book.UPDATE (4/15/16): We have now finished all 20 lessons last week, and I am blown away by how much progress he has made. It took us 4 months to finish, and last night he read me Dr. Seuss' "A Fish Out of Water", which is 68 pages long! Here is what I have learned:It is a great curriculum but it IS hard work for both parent and child. Please do not assume that it will be a breeze.1. Make sure your child knows letters/sounds, can rhyme, and has a 10 min attention span before you start this book. Otherwise, work on those first.2. Set a time every day and commit to it 100%. I even took it on vacation with us and he almost never had a day off. K quickly accepted reading lessons as his new routine.3. The authors recommend 1 page a day for under age 5, but with 400 pages, I realized that this would take me over a year!! (And I don't have patience for that) Because of my work schedule and not getting home till 5pm every day, I eventually settled on 2 pages a day on weekdays, and 2 pages twice a day on weekends and holidays. This enabled us to finish in four months. It usually took us less than 10 minutes to do 2 pages.4. In retrospect, this pace was rather fast and resulted in him not learning some sounds (especially vowel combinations) as well as he should because we rushed through them.5. I sometimes took videos of him reading and he absolutely loved to watch himself read. He was so proud of himself, and it was a great confidence booster. Plus I could show it off to friends and family, who told him how good his reading was, another confidence booster.6. The journey was not always easy or smooth sailing, so mentally prepare yourself for frustration and even tears. K hit his first roadblock around Lesson 4, and he kept saying "I can't do it, it's too hard!" As the authors say, this is perfectly normal and do NOT quit. Persevere!!!7. Nothing wrong with using a little bribery to get through the difficult pages. For K it was usually in the form of: after you finish you can have a Popsicle, play on the iPad, go to the park, etc.8. As we neared the end (around Lesson 15) I started telling him he was going to be an awesome reader and would be able to read books by the time we finished the reading lessons. The power of suggestion worked, and sure enough he really did start picking up books and reading them!!9. Even after we finished all 20 lessons, I continued to have him read aloud at least one book to me every day. There have been some occasions (increasingly more) that I find him in his room reading to himself! These moments have been AMAZING, and made all the time and effort I put in all worthwhile.10. It has been such an amazing, rewarding journey and I am SO glad I decided to teach him to read myself! He has learned not only to read, but to persevere through challenging tasks.Good luck!

Used this with my 4-year-old, and she learned to read by the time she was 5 years, 2 months old. Now she is 6 years, 2 months old, and can read chapter books and comprehends them well (e.g., Little House on the Prairie, Fairy books from Scholastic, American Girl chapter books). I just find her, reading books, and very happy; on long car trips, she reads--and she hasn't even started first grade yet. Amazing! She did not use the computer program that went with this since I decided to save the money. Now I am using this with my 4-year-old son, and he's on chapter 13, learning very well! The book we ordered for my son came with the CD, and it does help reinforce him in learning the chapters, too. We homeschool and this is great. Just commit to working on it for about 5-15 minutes every night, and your kids will make steady progress and retain what they learn. It is totally worth the commitment; it's such a gift to teach your child to read. If your kids go to public school, this will definitely get them off to a good start for reading. As a parent, read through the few pages of introduction on why this works (whole language and phonics approach combined), and for tips on how to help your child through the lessons. It's really amazing. I am also a speech-language pathologist; I know that reading is key to future success at school and learning. BTW, if your kids don't know any of their letters and corresponding sounds, I would recommend first buying a different product--The Letter Factory from Leap Frog. Have them watch it about 15 times (not in a row--just over time!) and they'll learn those sounds. Then progress to The Reading Lesson (and the Reading Lesson will teach even more sounds). That's how my kids did it, but that's just my advice! I cannot recommend this enough. The Reading Lesson is supposed to be designed for kids who have reading difficulties, too. Just 10-15 minutes of it per night can make a huge difference. You can try the first few chapters for free from their website, too. We love printing off the certificates free from the website when a chapter is mastered; then we post it in a prominent spot. I give this ten stars!

My daughter loved this book (The Reading Lesson: Teach Your Child to Read in 20 Easy Lessons). She is currently in kidergarten and reading on a late second to early third grade level. We used this book during her preschool years.I taught my daughter to read using "The Reading Lesson", but I used Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons to teach my first child. Both books use a similar approach. I believe that "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" gives the teacher (parent) a stronger foundation in teaching reading, and I used some of the tools I had gained from experiencing that method when teaching my daughter. The strength of "The Reading Lesson" is it's child-friendly appearance and approach. "Teach Your Child to Read..." is fully scripted and has the parent's script and child's assignments jammed together. My son hated it after a while. "The Reading Lesson" is not quite as strong of a program, but the pages are easy and fun for a child to look at. My daughter always wanted to do "just one more" page. Once we got to lesson 12 or 13 her reading started taking off. We actually didn't finish the book because she had gained enough tools to continue learning to read on her own.The cover is a little misleading when it says "teach your child to read in 20 easy lessons". "Lesson" here is more like a unit. Each "lesson" may be 10-15 pages long, and is not designed to be completed in a day. With young children you would probably only do one page a day, where you might do several with older/highly motivated children. You and your child determine the pacing of the lessons. With "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" each of the 100 lessons is intended to be taught in one day. "The Reading Lesson" is more flexible, "Teaching Your Child to Read..." is more scripted and rigid. In "The Reading Lesson" one days lesson might be practicing sounds, another day practicing words, another day reading a story, some days a combination. In "Teach Your Child to Read..." each day's lesson follows a similar format which includes sound practice, blending practice, word reading, story reading, and sounds writing practice. I believe the integrated writing practice is one of the strengths of the this approach. With "The Reading Lesson" system you can order additional books that include writing practice, as well as computer software.When you visit the website for "The Reading Lesson" you can download the first two lessons for free. If you email the company they will send you a download for the third lesson as well. We did this to "test drive" the book before buying it. The first three lessons are representative of the rest of the book, but later lessons have more stories. In fact, lesson 20 is entirely stories. Through the company's website you can also download free certificates of completion for each lesson. These were very motivating for my daughter.In conclusion, I feel that both methods can be successfully used to teach children to read. "Teaching Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" was stronger in it's methodology, and I'm glad I gained some experience teaching reading with that method, but it was not child friendly for my son. If I can't get my child to use it without whining and crying, it's not much use no matter how strong of a foundation it builds. "The Reading Lesson" uses a similar approach, but is much more fun for children. My daughter really looked forward to her reading lesson time, and she loved to call relatives on the phone and read stories to them. This is the book I would recommend to most parents, especially of reluctant readers.

I'd been looking for the right learn to read program for awhile. This one fits the bill perfectly in many ways. First, it starts out and uses primarily lower case letters which is a huge plus. I've never understood teaching kids the upper case first. Something like 99% of all the letters that we read are lower case so it makes sense to start with and focus on those. The sounds are presented usually 3 at a time and start with the most common letters so that kids can start "reading" right away. In the first lessons the text is quite large and gets slightly smaller with each lesson or so which is a good transition for kids. Pictures on the page are very simple and kept to a minimum so as not to be distracting.I got this a few weeks before my daughter turned 4. She's known her letters and sounds for quite awhile and was ready to move on. The first 2-3 lessons we whizzed through 6-8 pages at a time. After that we slowed to 4 pages per day which takes us about 10 mins at a leisurely pace. We've just gotten to lesson 6 and this still seems to be a good pace for her. We may need to slow a bit as the lessons get more complicated but I'll have to follow her lead. At the rate we're going we'd finish the book in about 3 mos which would be amazing. The lessons at the end are probably at the Step 2-3 reader stage so if she was doing that by 4-1/2 yrs old I'd be thrilled!So far, my daughter is really enjoying the program and its working for us. We do the book at night before she goes to bed because she's nice and calm then. I can see how for some kids they might be too tired at that time of day but for us it works. Amazingly, she often brings me the book in the morning when she wakes up and asks to do a page from her lesson book so, like I said, she's enjoying it. Yeah!I'd highly recommend this book!**EDITED**We're now just finishing chapter 18 of the book and I continue to be absolutely amazed at my daughter's progress! We slowed down to 3 or sometimes even 2 pages per day. At this rate we complete a lesson a week. As you near the end of the book there are a few places where several concepts are introduced very quickly. For instance, they do a page (yes a single page) where they introduce three endings -ful, -ness, and -less as in "helpful", "sadness" and "helpless". I thought it might be really difficult actually its gone well although I do think that breaking it down a bit and maybe having there be 25 lessons rather than 20 would have been helpful.Here's what we do for most of the pages:1. I introduce the concept to my daughter by reading her the very short instruction at the top of the page.2. I have her sound the words out and offer help if needed.3. We do the page "together" which usually means me moving my finger along and having her read the words a bit faster.This process takes us about 10 mins per day. I've been supplementing with having her read a Step Reader Level 1 to me each evening which takes another 5-10 mins.The author suggests, and based on our experience I agree, that reading through each page more than twice is unnecessary. I've found that even though the concept might be a bit slippery to her if we are able to move onto the paragraph/stories she tends to pick it up more quickly.Great book, still highly recommend.

We bought this right before my son turned 4, and we are now about halfway through the book. I can’t say enough good things about it. The lessons are straightforward, short enough to keep his attention, and build skills in a way that really makes sense. He is already reading so well, and it’s amazing to watch his confidence grow each week.As a parent, I appreciate how easy it is to follow no prep, just open the book and go. My son looks forward to the lessons, which is a huge win at this age. I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a gentle but effective way to teach their child to read. It has been a wonderful experience for us, and I’m glad we started early.

This is a great book to teach your kid how read.Feedback from my kid who just finished this book - 'I like this book and thank you for making it'.

Well recommended. I teach my celebral palsy child using this book.

A versão impressa é em preto e branco e muito pouco atraente para crianças. As atividades são muito repetitivas. O livro é muito grosso e dificulta o uso para crianças pequenas. Estou tendo dificuldade de usar. Seria melhor uma versão digital que possa ser impressa folha por folha.

Mi hijo tiene solo tres años pero mostraba muchísimo interés por aprender el nombre de las letras y jugaba con los fonemas de manera "autodidacta" por lo que lo compré para ver si le apetecía empezar a leer, y efectivamente página a página, cada día va siemdo capaz de leer. Él está muy orgulloso de sus progresos y yo de acompañarle en su proceso :)

I used this book to teach my 5yo son to read, it helped him a lot.The book is well done, very progressive. The method has worked well with my son who is now (a year later) a passionate reader who can read full story book with passion!

I have 100 easy lesson and alpha phonic book but my son dint read in those books when I introduced this book he started reading 3:letter word but not fast,, I hope he will pick up