5 Reasons We Love All About Reading
As a homeschooling mom of over a thirteen years, I have to say that there is nothing quite like teaching your children how to read. It makes my heart happy that I have taught all three of our children how to read. I love everything about it. From the introduction of the alphabet to phonics to the day they sound out their very first word. Every part of teaching my children how to read gives me such joy. But one thing is for sure, there is more to reading than teaching the basics, a lot more.
What do I mean? Simply put: I do not just want my children to read, but rather to succeed in all-things reading. I want my children to retain what they read, be excited to learn how to read better, and be able to have fun while doing it! And with All About Reading our two youngest sons are doing just that!
5 Reasons We Love All About Reading
1. The multisensory approach.
As any homeschooling parent knows, no two children are alike. From the way they learn to their personalities – every child absorbs the world around them in very unique ways. By using a multisensory approach, it allows your child to maximize their learning experience by cementing it through seeing, hearing, and touching. For our two sons, this is an invaluable tool.
2. It can catch the attention of a wiggle worm.
For real. Our youngest son who is a budding nearly 6-year-old first grader jumps and wiggles all the time. We laugh because we believe that the song Jumpy Jump (from Yo Gabba Gabba) was written exclusively for our youngest son. So at times you can imagine how hard it is to grab the attention of a little boy who’d rather be jumping.
However, All About Reading Level 1 has captured his full attention. And it isn’t just one thing about All About Reading Level 1, it’s everything! From the exercises to the review, our little jumping wiggle worm fully engages in every lesson we do. As a matter of fact he asks to do it all the time. Major SCORE for this homeschool momma!
3. Mastery-based lessons.
This is such a brilliant approach built with the child’s success in mind. One of the premises of All About Reading is that there are no gaps in the knowledge your child learns. I have found this to be entirely true. With this being the second year of us using All About Learning products, I can see how powerful the master-based approach really is. When we first started using this curriculum last year with our oldest son, he was struggling to do anything beyond reading. He couldn’t remember anything he read, nor did he have the desire to.
Since using All About Reading, I have watched him blossom into an advanced reader that never misses the chance to read a book or anything else within eyesight! It is such a pleasure to see this transformation in our son.
4. The flexibility in lesson planning.
While there are suggestions for how to schedule the curriculum, you can easily adapt it to fit your child’s personal needs. This is a huge benefit when you are teaching multiple children as you have to weave in several subjects each day with precision for your particular family. I have become very fond of curriculums that leave room for “interpretation” when it comes to implementation and scheduling.
5. The wonderful variety of the readers and reading activities.
I am so impressed with the variety of unusual words in the readers. I have purchased a number of different reading programs over the years and they all seemed to contain “typical” words like: the, are, she, hit, etc. But not All About Reading‘s readers! In recent lessons our 2nd grade son read words like: muskrat, grump, quills, branch, eggnog, humpback, and lapdog (to name a few). It’s so nice to have such a variety of words as I can see the confidence in their eyes when they are able to read such unique words in their stories.
