Alpha-Phonics Book Review

I’m trying to teach my son (M2) to read so this was a timely review for Alpha-Phonics. When you order Alpha-Phonics, you also get the book in a CD rom version free of charge. This is great if you’d like to print out extra copies or if you’d like to work on a mobile device. Alpha-Phonics is a no nonsense reading curriculum. What I mean is there are no cute little coloring pages or characters that teach your child to read. Each lesson, has a word list that is printed in black and white. That is it. When I first received the book and purused through it, I thought it was overly simple, and I really questioned whether this book was going to teach my child to read. It looked to easy. The teacher’s lessons are at the back of the book. There’s a little introduction. The book assumes that you are going through and teaching your child the alphabet and then their sounds. There are 128 lessons in the book starting from letter sounds to words like gymnasium, syllable and hypnosis as well as sentences. My son already knew this so we started right into the lessons. I took some time reading through the teacher’s portion first to familiarize myself with the program. The book is written to a teacher of a classroom, but is easily adaptable to your homeschool. We went through the beginning lessons just fine, this was material we had already covered and he was use to sounding things out. The program suggests to do a review a previous material, and states it in the lesson plans. Some of the lessons are longer than others. We didn’t use it as one lesson per day. My child is 5 years old, so there were times when I broke down the list to a more manageable number. I don’t want him to hate learning to read so I let him decide how much we did. We do reading daily so this is a routine for him. And at this point he loves learning to read new words. The text suggests writing out the words and then adding letters to them as you are teaching. This is written to a classroom teacher but I just used the book. This was easy for us and for me particularly. As you go through the program, the lesson plans asks you to introduce the new sound, and then go through the word list. It is a really short lesson plan but at that point, you should have a good idea of how the program works. I like that the book uses a sans serif font, so it doesn’t confuse the child. The lists go by sounds and then also add words that rhyme ie. bet, get, jet… which adds a lot more words to your child’s vocabulary. I’m glad that I discovered this program since it differs from my regular curriculum. We are definitely going to finish this one. The Alpha-Phonics textbook is available for purchase for $34.95 from their website, at the time of this review and includes the CD rom. There is also an ebook version available for download that is $22.95. You can follow them on Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter. This giveaway will run from October 31, 20113 2pm to November 14, 2013 11:59pm est and is open to residents in the U.S. and Canada. Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this product in exchange for my honest review. I was not required to write a positive review nor was I compensated in any other way. All opinions expressed are my own or those of my family. I am disclosing this in accordance with the FTC regulations.