• Distar Reading Program Worksheets

Mar 15, 2012. Since I've experienced four different reading programs, I've come to learn a thing or two about teaching my daughter to read and what works for us. Of my kids using starfall and am now working with two more. Morestarfall has a yearly membership, but it's affordable and comes with worksheet generators.

After completing the Letter of the Week curriculum (or sooner if you feel your child is ready) you can start into a phonics curriculum and/or beginning readers. Or you can continue with the Brightly Beaming curriculums and work through Sound of the Week and Story of the Week. There are so many different phonics programs it can be hard to choose. I have recommended programs that are not as expensive as others, (so do not have a lot of gimmicks), but are very good programs and do the job well for many families. If possible try to borrow a copy from a friend or the library, before purchasing, to make sure it is the program you really want. Every child is different and you are the best judge of what will work for your child. Happy reading!

Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons

Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons by Siegfried Engelmann, Phyllis Haddox, and Elaine Bruner. This book is based on the proven SRA DISTAR Reading Program. This program can work well with children as young as 3. The program takes 20 minutes a day and after 100 lessons your child will be reading on a 2nd grade level.

Visit the 100 Easy Lessons web site.

Visit Worksheets Unlimited for worksheets that go along with each lesson.

Phonics Pathways

Phonics Pathways: Clear Steps to Easy Reading and Perfect Spelling by Dolores G. Hiskes(8th Edition). She presents letters and sounds one at a time which progress to words, phrases and sentences. The book can also be used to teach spelling to about 4th grade. The book is user friendly and you only need to spend as little as 10 minutes a day.

Visit the Phonics Pathways web site.

Alpha-Phonics

Alpha-Phonics: A Primer for Beginning Readers by Samuel L. Blumenfeld. In this primer the lessons start with blending 2 and 3 letter words right away. Each lesson has been hand lettered and is easy to read. This book can also be used to supplement other reading programs. It is systematic in approach and requires almost no teacher preparation. Sample pages can be viewed on the Alpha-Phonics web site.

Visit the Alpha-Phonics web site.

Reading Made Easy

Reading Made Easy: A Guide to Teach Your Child to Read by Valerie Bendt. This program was written for, and tested by, homeschool families. The lessons are fully scripted and include writing and drawing activities. You teach 3 lessons per week and they take less than 30 minutes a day. Christian content.

Visit the Reading Made Easy web site.

The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading

This book is written by Jessie Wise and Sara Buffington. Jessie Wise is the co-author of The Well-Trained Mind. This is a complete reading program that is simple and easy to use. The lessons are scripted which makes it fun to do. You can see samples of the lessons on the following website.

Visit The Ordinary Parent's web site.

Pathway Readers

Pathway Readers are a treasure in our family! We love these books. These readers are published by Pathway Publishers and include readers for Grades 1 - 8. The readers are full of character building stories, values, and good morals. The publishers are Amish and the stories depict the wholesome Amish way of life. Accompanying workbooks are also available that cover phonics, spelling, reading comprehension, etc.

Visit Home School Products to learn more about these great readers.

Explode the Code Workbooks

These are an excellent set of workbooks to supplement any phonics program. Books A - C can even be used with the Letter of the Week curriculum. You could choose to teach the letters in the order presented in these workbooks. These first three books cover all the consonant sounds. Short vowels are introduced in Book 1. Since the workbooks involve handwriting they will work best with young children who are interested in doing so. My 4yos loves to practice writing the letters and these books are working well with him.

Visit EPS Books to see samples from these workbooks.

Other Reading Resources

Check your library for beginning readers such as I Can Read Books, Step Into Reading, Dr. Seuss, and others. Read with your child daily and encourage him to read as many words on his own as possible.

Other interesting web sites with reading resources:

TampaReads.com
Teach a Child to Read
Reading a - z.com
Starfall
Primary Success Publications
StudyDog Reading Program
The Elson Readers
Bob Books
Progressive Phonics

~Back~

Copyright © 2000 - 2007 by Katrina Lybbert
Email: webmaster@letteroftheweek.com
http://www.letteroftheweek.com

A quick note about a resource you may like:

The Everyday Homeschooler’s Guide to Teaching the Early Yearsis for all parents of young students who are beginning to homeschool or who are in their early elementary years. Homeschooling young children doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive, and this no-fuss resource will show you how. It will guide you on how to create an ideal environment that will honor your child’s natural desire to learn as well as how to foster creativity and tips on setting priorities.

This resource also answers many questions that new homeschoolers have, such as What are my kids supposed to learn? What resources should I use? How do I meet other homeschoolers? And much more.

Thanks so much to my readers for inspiring me to write this. I hope it helps.

Click here to view the Table of Contents and Introduction.

Click here to purchase.

Now back to the original post….

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Earlier this year I decided to try Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons for my then four-year-old. (We started three months before his 5th birthday.) If you look up the reviews on this book, which is also called the Distar method, they are mostly favorable, but I could see that it doesn’t work for everybody. That’s not surprising because nothing works for everybody.

Fortunately, my son loved the lessons when we began the book, and I liked the book because it was easy for me to use.

There is an eighteen-page parent guide at the beginning of the book, which is important to read, and in each lesson, there’s a script that parents are supposed to follow exactly. At first this looked daunting, but after reading the guide and doing a few lessons with my son, I saw that it was beneficial. During the early lessons, I kept to the script fairly well, though I changed some of the words because I knew my son would understand me better with my changes.

Distar Reading Program Worksheets

As we continued on with the book, I didn’t have to read the script so closely because it’s very repetitive, and by then my son knew what he needed to do. However, I glanced at each lesson beforehand to see if there were any changes.

What I like the most about 100 Lessons is that each lesson builds on the one before it, and it introduces new letter sounds gradually. It helped that my son already knew all the sounds of the letters before we started this book, but the way it’s taught, you could potentially teach a child who doesn’t know any phonics.

I have a feeling that if my son had not known the sounds of the letters, he would not have liked it. Since the beginning lessons were very easy for him, it built his confidence and showed him that reading lessons were not scary. As he sounded out words with these sounds, he was delighted that he could read!

A couple of points about how this book teaches reading:

• The book teaches the child to sound out words by blending the sounds together instead of pausing between sounds. For example, we usually teach kids to sound out the word “mat” by saying “mmm (pause) aaa (pause) t.” The Distar method says not to pause. Say “mmmaaat.” This simple technique helped my son hear the word, and he was able to decipher it quicker.
• The book also uses an altered orthography or symbols to help the child read. That is, if the sound is a long A, such as in the word “lake”, there is a line over the A, and if it’s a short A sound, such as in the word “cat,” there’s no line. Silent letters, such as the E in “lake” are printed smaller.

The altered orthography worried me at first because I wondered how my son would transition to regular books with regular print, but quickly this worry faded. My son was so excited that he could read! He said, “I can read in this book, but I can’t read in those.”

Three things I liked about the book:

• The silly pictures: My son would read the stories in the book, and I would keep the accompanying picture covered until he finished. He always looked forward to seeing the picture, so this gave him an incentive to finish the lesson. (Yet I can see where the pictures and stories might not interest older children.)
• The book gradually introduces many irregular words or “sight words,” and since there’s so much repetition in the book, my son has most of them memorized now. This is why I didn’t worry about the altered orthography.
• The book also requires the student to write two or three sounds at the end of each lesson. Fortunately, my son was already writing well and enjoyed this part too. It’s a good reinforcement of the sounds and practice of writing.

Making my child excited about reading is the first step in getting him to read. I’m grateful that 100 Lessons got us on the road to reading. Yet, as we got further into it, things changed.

Once we got to around Lesson 50, the lessons got harder. It wasn’t that my son wasn’t reading well. He could do the lessons, and he was learning, but while we did the lessons, he would squirm in his seat, start talking about other topics, and act silly. It was very hard for him to focus on the lesson.

I should interject here and say that the book claims these lessons will take only twenty minutes a day. The first few lessons took only twenty minutes, but as they get harder and there’s more reading involved, they take much longer. And when my child could not focus and kept squirming, I think we spent closer to 45 minutes completing a lesson.

Suddenly it became a lesson in patience for mama! Fortunately, this was about the time we were going on vacation to Chicago, so we took a break. After returning home, I looked up 100 Lessons on the Internet and began to read what other people’s experiences were.

I found one person who said a tutor recommended this book for her child, but emphasized that the lessons should remain light and fun. Another man described his little girl as squirmy and unable to focus too. He gave her incentives to finish each lesson, which worked.

Reading this renewed my patience with my son, and I regained my equanimity. Here are some tactics I employed:

• I made sure we had plenty of time to do the lessons. I didn’t rush my son through them.
• I gave my son “wiggle moments” when he got too fidgety, and he loved that. I’d count to three and then we’d both wiggle for a few minutes.
• I was also more likely to take a day off from a lesson if we were busy with errands whereas in the beginning, I kept a tight daily schedule.

With this new strategy, we inched our way up to Lesson 70 where we reached another plateau. At that point, the book became monotonous. Since my son was reading quite well anyway, I decided to take another break from the book. Now I feel we probably won’t go back to it. I’ve searched my shelves for all the early readers in my house, and my son seems excited to be able to read real books with more lively illustrations.

Above is a photo of part of Lesson 69. My son completed through Lesson 70.

At the end of 100 Lessons, it states that a child who successfully completes this program will be reading at a second grade level. Considering that my son is only five-years-old, I feel confident that I don’t have to push him to finish it right now. He is happy that he’s starting to read, and he’s reading early readers. I couldn’t be more pleased.

If you have a young child who is struggling with reading, I highly suggest giving 100 Lessons a try. I’m not sure it would interest older students because the stories and pictures are silly, but it never hurts to try. Also, I found the book used online for $11, so it doesn’t hurt the pocket book either.

Have you tried Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons? What was your experience with it? UPDATE: I will be posting an update of our experience with 100 Easy Lessons this January 2014. My son is now seven, and we are finishing the book!

UPDATE JANUARY 2014: We have finished 100 Easy Lessons. Read about our experience with it two years later here: 1st Grade Homeschool Reading