Mountcastle Company The Reading Lesson: Teach Your Child to Read in 20 Easy Lessons

My daughter is special needs and we homeschool. I want to start by saying we tried the Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. We tried for over a month and my daughter couldn’t get pass the first lesson. The pages were extremely busy and hard to focus. After venting with a friend she showed me her copy of this book. I immediately got on Amazon and purchased it. The pages aren’t busy at all. My daughter can focus and understands the different sounds perfectly. She doesn’t get frustrated with herself like she did with that other book series. I copy the intro to the new sounds pages and tape them to the wall for her to use. We sometimes have to repeat a lesson more than once for her to fully grasp the sounds, but I can now say that my daughter can read level 1 books only after two months of this book. I highly recommend it!!

When I was looking for something to help me teach my kids to read I was overwhelmed with the number options out there. I didn't think I should have to spend a bunch of money to do it and I didn't think I would stick with a big program. I saw "The Reading Lesson" and after reading the reviews I decided to try it.I bought my first copy 4 years ago and used it to teach my daughter to read when she was 5. At first my daugher was happy to do it but once the initial excitement wore off she did start to resist a little. So I bought some stickers and everytime she finished a page she'd get to put a sticker on it. After completing about 4 or 5 lessons it became an easy part of her routine with no more resisting. We finished maybe 2/3 of the book and one day I heard her, from another room in the house, reading a book out loud fluently and perfectly. I was surprised when I heard her because she was reading words and sounds we hadn't yet covered in our lessons.I'm a busy working mom. I have never taught anyone to read before and this book made it very simple. Since it worked so well with my daughter I recently purchased my second copy of this book to teach my 4 year old son to read. I wasn't sure how well he would do because he is a little hyper and younger than my daughter was when I taught her. With him I started out with just one page each day. We're up to lesson 8 and he is sailing through and begs me to let him do more. He's been reading 3-4 pages each day. He's excited about reading and likes to look ahead in the book to see what new sounds he's going to learn. I can't say enough good things about this book. I only wish I had found this book to help me with my first kid.Pros:-Easy-Self PacedCons:-None

I homeschool my 7 year old and take a different approach than most. I tried 2 years in a row to start her on her alphabet (letter recognition). She could sing the song, but couldn't identify the letters. At 5 and 6 she just wasn't ready for focused work and I couldn't seem to make a game of it so I waited and worried that I might not be doing the right thing. I promised my husband that this year we would do focused work one way or another or I would just have to put her in public school, which I desperately did not want to do. We started this book in September and her word recognition is growing by leaps and bounds! The best part is that the lessons only take about 20 minutes so there really isn't much fighting to get her to sit and focus that long! We do other activities to round out our day, but this is by far the most productive one. I can't recommend this book enough! There is also a downloadable writing book that goes along with this book that I highly recommend as well.

I used this book to help teach a 60 year old refugee how to read. She could speak six languages, but had never attended school or been literate in any language. I was afraid this book might be too babyish, but she loved it. I think the simplicity of the phrases and stories made her feel more relaxed, and she sometimes used the illustrations to pick up clues about the story.While I liked the book too, there were things that were annoying to me. The book often uses short phrases before longer passages as a way to let the reader practice key words. You have to keep in mind that they use a very specific progression in this book. For a long time, sentences will begin with lowercase letters--and that actually makes sense if you read their philosophy on that--but it annoyed me that sentences often had random periods, and didn't make much sense. This may not be as much of an issue if you are teaching a child whose first language is English, but it was a little more problematic when teaching an adult who is trying to understand what things mean, and why things are phrased in certain ways.The other thing that was frustrating was that some of their pronunciation cues were simply wrong--for instance, the double "oo" is very different if you're pronouncing "zoo" or "too" versus "took" or "look". And there were other issues, particularly with the long "U" sound.For those who have specific preferences on how to teach reading, I would say this book relies a little more on memorization rather than rules. I taught her some of the rules as we went through the book together, and we practiced common sight words to help get her up to speed faster.Overall this book was a great help, and increased her confidence dramatically. Just try to relax and go with the flow of this teaching method, if you are going to try it. While it doesn't make much sense at first, I promise they move into proper punctuation, capitalization, and grammar by the end! Mainly, keep sessions short and positive so that your emerging reader will feel confident and excited about their progress, and will love reading in the future. Good luck!