Even though Little Bug is doing a phonics curriculum at her new school, I am still doing All About Reading Level 1 with her on the two days she is home because I love this program and so does she! It used to take us 3-5 days to complete one lesson, but now we are completing a lesson in about 1-3 days.

Here is the anatomy of a typical lesson.

Review

The lessons begin with a time of review. Review of letter sounds you’ve already learned and review of words you have already read. A big component of AAR is review. You may be tempted to skip over it, but it is an important part of this program. All of the cards for review are kept in this box:

New Teaching

Teach New Letter Sounds

Then it is time to learn the new material for the lesson. This is Lesson 12 of Level 1. There was one new letter sound to learn: the short /e/ sound. The long /e/ sound will be taught in a later lesson.

Blend Sounds with Letter Tiles

This is when you get to play with the Letter Tiles, which Little Bug really enjoys.

Play “Change the Word”

You continue to play with the Letter Tiles while playing this game. Using the tiles, you build words for your child to read. I have Little Bug build the word and then read the word to me. In this lesson the first word she built was jet. Then I told her to change out the letter j for the letter m. Then she read the new word she had just built…met. We continued to play this game until we had built and read all of these words: met, men, hen, pen, pet, bet, yet, yes. I love that Little Bug is not reading words straight from a phonics worksheet and Little Bug loves playing with and manipulating the Letter Tiles to make words!

Complete Activity Sheet

Next there was an activity sheet to complete. These are not typically worksheets but instead are interactive activities for your child to complete that reinforce the concepts being taught in the lesson! This activity was called “Monkeys and Bananas”. There were three monkeys named Ned, Peg and Dot. There were 15 bananas with words on them and each monkey was to eat only the bananas with words that rhymed with their name.

Practice Reading Words

This lesson had 8 Word Cards. Little Bug flips through the cards, reading each one. After she reads the cards they are placed aside for review at the beginning of the next lesson. The Word Cards are reviewed until she has mastered each word. Little Bug typically masters the Word Cards during the lesson but we still review them before the next lesson!

Practice Fluency

If there is a part of AAR that Little Bug doesn’t particularly like, it is probably the Fluency Practice sheet. Your child is to read the New Words and the Mixed Review of words to practice reading fluency. These lists have gotten pretty lengthy as we have gotten deeper into the program. I have gotten creative with this part of All About Reading. Instead of having Little Bug read the words, phrases and sentences from the paper, I type the words onto the screen of my computer. This keeps her attention way longer than reading from the paper. We typically do everything I have written about before this part on Day 1 of the lesson. Then Day 2 (and sometimes 3) is reading the Fluency sheet (or sheets).

I like the way it has Little Bug read sentences. It breaks the sentence up into phrases. So your child begins by reading the phrase, The bad rat. Then they read the second phrase of the sentence, can jab the cat. Then they put it all together to read the complete sentence, The bad rat can jab the cat. This helps to build reading fluency. (This sentence example is from Lesson 4.)

Read Aloud Time

After each lesson there is time built in for reading aloud to your child for twenty minutes. I typically don’t read aloud to Little Bug during the same time we do our All About Reading lessons. We read aloud in the afternoons and/or before bedtime. Currently we are reading My Father’s Dragon.

Track Your Progress

After each lesson, Little Bug places a star sticker on her Progress Chart. She loves doing this!

And that was Lesson 12!

All About Reading Readers

The readers for All About Reading are not your stereotypical “readers” that you associate with learning to read. Your child will have three hardcover books with multiple stories in each book to read! The stories are cute and the illustrations are gorgeous. Little Bug has finished several of the stories in a fit of laughter! The first lesson where your child will read one of the stories from the reader is Lesson 5.

All About Reading Teacher’s Manual

The All About Reading Teacher’s Manuals are so easy to use! Everything you need to know for each lesson is right there, laid out in plain view. If you want a script to know exactly what to say during phonics instructions, it is there. However, you do not have to go by the script and can instead use the script as a guideline for instruction. There are helpful teaching tips in the manual. All About Reading is extremely easy to teach! I have a teaching degree but I had no experience with teaching phonics (since I taught 4th grade). I was a little nervous about having to teach my child to learn to read. All About Reading has made it easy to teach from!

Why I Love All About Reading

1. All About Reading includes everything I need to know to make my child a proficient reader. Every component of reading is taught: decoding (phonics and structural analysis), vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.

2. All About Reading is an open-and-go curriculum. Prep time for lessons is extremely minimal. The only real prep is tearing all the review cards apart and organizing them into the Review Box. Even still, all the prep work was done in under an hour. Each week I do pull out the activity sheets, review cards and reader needed for the lesson and place the items in Little Bug’s workboxes for the week. This takes at most 2-3 minutes of prep work for the entire week!

3. All About Reading teaches reading with a multisensory approach. It is not all phonics worksheets! Little Bug is building words with the Letter Tiles, playing phonics games, doing fun reading activities to learn and reading words from flashcards and fun readers.

4. The cost is relatively cheap! All About Reading Level 1 was $119 for the deluxe package which includes everything you need to teach one student for one year. When Sweet Pea is ready for Level 1 all I will need to purchase for her is the Student Activity Book for $16.95! All of the other materials can be used with multiple students. So by the time all three of our children have gone through Level 1 we will have spent only $50.96 per child to learn to read with this awesome program!

At the time I am writing this, we are on Lesson 12 of All About Reading Level 1. We will keep plugging along (all through summer as we want) and complete Level 1 at some point and then I plan to move right in to Level 2 with Little Bug. Sweet Pea will begin with the Pre-Reading Level in the Fall!

- Elaine