The Rhyme and Reason Reading Program: Evidence-Based Reading Instruction for the Montessori Classroom

Thank you, Emily, for this absolutely fantastic program for teaching reading!I am a homeschool mom who was starting to get very nervous. I really wanted to do a great job teaching my daughter to read. We did the 1000 Books before Kindergarten challenge 3 times over. I had been working my way through the Montessori pre-reading materials for a long time. My daughter could definitely hear the phonemes but when I tried making the connection to the letters, she just wasn’t picking it up. We also tried Reading Eggs (which the background music will make you absolutely crazy) but after months I didn’t feel like she was really catching on even with me sitting with her and trying to explicitly teach the phonemes. My husband was reading to her every night, but my daughter didn’t want him pointing at words or asking her to sound anything out. My mother-in-law was helping her practice writing cursive letters. We were all working so hard, but my daughter was becoming increasingly resistant to reading. By six and a half I was starting to worry that something was wrong and beginning to wonder if we were going have to get some extra help. Around that time, I watched the Montessori and the Science of Reading P2P Summit (Trillium Montessori Courses $125). I was super impressed by Emily’s presentation and decided to get this book and try her approach. And viola after 3 months I had a kid who could easily decode words!! It was like a miracle! These were exactly the tools we needed and at the right time. Emily, you saved the day!For any homeschool moms out there this is what our experience looked like, and these are my tips. I had already spent a bunch of money on reading programs and tools so I was hesitant to spend more until I was sure this approach would work. Regrettably, I didn’t buy the printable materials which looking back I wish I had. Anyway, I used the lists in the book to make my own flip booklets which I printed, cut out and bound together with mini binder clips. If you are going to go this route, my tip on this is to use a font that makes the a and g look the way you want your kids to think about those letters so maybe the century gothic font. I really liked having used the binder clips because the flexibility of being able to remove the words and put them in different orders or make piles for extra practice was very useful.We were so far into practicing letters and reading that I felt comfortable doing 1 complete lesson per day and working just about every day until we were done with the program. In the beginning we would break the lessons up into 3 parts and work in 3 sessions throughout the day. Thankfully my daughter had the attention span and tenacity to work this way. But if I had started earlier, I probably would have been happy working on one lesson per week especially if she needed the time and practice. As a note, as the process went on we got through the lessons went more and more quickly. The consonants get continuous practice in each lesson so mastery of those eventually came together even if they were a little tricky in the beginning. After we completed the blue lessons, we paused for several days and did extra practice on all the vowel sounds/spellings and anything that we were still tripping over.We enjoyed using the Draw and Write Journal for Kids available on Amazon for $8. This was really nice for doing our writing practice. My mistake was not buying a second one for myself to write in as I demonstrated the writing. I just used printouts, but the book would have been better.We chose the Bob Books for our decodable readers and our daughter got a real kick out of them. If you have a difficult time finding them on Amazon, give Ebay a try.I definitely recommend having the moveable alphabet (this investment is well worth it). We used this all the time to learn about new letter combinations and compare them to sounds/letters we already learned about. I also had good results teaching about breves and macrons (the dictionary symbols for short and long sounds). I got a set of acrylic Moveable Punctuation Marks (ETC Montessori $35) and I used the comma as a breve and the hyphen as the macron over the moveable alphabet. This was especially helpful when working with words like give/hive, have/shave, live/live, glove/stove.A heads up about the letter A. Ant, ball, father, zebra, acorn, any, warm, charm. The A represents all different sounds in those words and you may want to be ready to talk about this phenomenon. We tripped over this all the way until the end of the program, and I think maybe if I had known to be aware of this earlier I could have developed a better strategy in my mind for teaching about A.I know Montessori doesn’t like extrinsic rewards, stickers, and such. But I made a chart of all the lessons and after every lesson we put a sticker on the chart and my daughter absolutely loved managing her progress this way. She looked forward every day to earning her sticker for the lesson and couldn’t wait to tell the grandparents about it. By the end she was so proud of herself for all her hard work and completing the chart.I completely agree with Emily’s recommendations about these books. Highly Irregular by Arika Okrent, Spell It Out by David Crystal, Uncovering the Logic of English by Denise Eide. You will profoundly benefit from having them in your library. What I didn’t know about the English language was astonishing! Having reasons for the eccentricities of English will help you to truly teach English and give your kids tools that are very empowering. They can learn to embrace the wonders of English and not focus on the frustrations. I wish I had been taught with these tools when I was a kid, we could have skipped the tears and heartache.I found having a great dictionary to be invaluable. There were definitely perks to the paper copy as opposed to just searching the word pronunciations on the internet (which was important too).The book Make It Stick - The Science of Successful Learning by Peter Brown was also helpful to me. Coming back to the lessons a few days later and practicing again really seemed to help solidify the learning. The flip booklets provide an easy way of “testing” to help facilitate the learning.All in all, this book was fantastically helpful to our family, and I am very grateful to Emily for putting this together. Best wishes to everyone!P.S. Emily, I’m looking forward to your next book!

Caveat: this book assumes you are already familiar with the Montessori approach to language. And though the book is written with album style lessons, it does not mean to substitute a complete album - things like concepts work, verbal development, and mechanical preparation for writing are omitted. It is also geared towards an elementary classroom, though adapting it for primary seems straightforward.Emily presents a detailed case as to what a writing and reading program for English needs, why this is difficult for English in particular, and reiterates that the general Montessori approach mostly matches the science of what we know nowadays about reading. The difficulty in in adapting it to English, which is what this book attempts to do.I found the writing clear, and the author outlines well the why of how she does what she does, and the clear goal of building a basic code.The program starts even before that with phonemic awareness and brings in new and fresh exercises and interesting uses of materials already present in a Montessori classroom.This book does not contain the card material (sold separately), but enough information to recreate most of it but not all - this would be one of my complaints. I was considering recreating the reading cards with real photos (I prefer real photos over art and line art in my 3-6 classroom), and whilst it's doable for the drawers there will still be parts of the program missing.I will definitely be incorporating parts of this in my classroom and am considering switching from Waseca to these drawers for reading - the objectives and the sequence are much clearer.

The Rhyme & Reason Program is fantastic!We have been using it for the past three months and have seen huge strides with our littles in writing and reading. The readers are fantastic since there are NO pictures and the child has no hints on what the sentences reads.We love the pre-printed material book too, just cut and go!Highly recommended!

I am a self-educated Montessorian & a homeschooling mom, and this book is revolutionary to me. The instructions are clear and Emily's theory is evidence-based and Montessori-based. The materials (not including in this book) are beautiful and practical as well. Highly recommend her work and this program.

This is a well researched and excellent resource for both teachers and parents helping children learn to read. It is aimed at Montessori teachers for use in the classroom but would work very well in a homeschooling situation. The material presented is based on sound research in reading instruction and preséntate in a very user friendly way. Order the related card set and be ready to go!

Emily has written an invaluable program to help educators teach children to read with scientifically sound and Montessori aligned principles. I love the addition of easy to understand pieces of etymology and linguistic history to explain some of the unique challenges associated with English. I also appreciate how straight forward the lessons are for each part of the program. After reading it in one week, I’ve already started implementing the lessons in my classroom! That kind of turnaround is so helpful!