Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons: Revised and Updated Second Edition

This review will be continuously updated as we progress through the 100 lessons. I will make a new update every 20 lessons.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Son's Age: 5 1/2Ability to read at start: Knew ABCs and most of the phonics. Had never read words on his own.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~As the parent (or instructor), please take time to truly read the introductory pages. They go over why this method works and how long it took them to achieve success with all the children they tested this book's method on. It took years of revisions of the method until they reached the one used in this book. It gives very specific instructions on how to teach, the tone to use, how to correct mistakes, pronunciation, etc. Success hinges on the parent's ability to teach correctly. If we don't put in the effort, it will fail. PERIOD.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~(2/16/18)Lessons 1-20: Let me start by being perfectly honest with you. The first 5 lessons were tortuous for both me and my 5 year old son. He does not like to sit still, he does not like to repeat things over and over again, and it was extremely confusing for both him and myself as we began this book. I was still getting used to the teaching aspect, and he was getting used to the sitting still and repeating sounds over and over and over again. I nearly gave up after the first 5 days. You may want to as well. PERSEVERE!We pushed on, and I adjusted my attitude from one of impatience to one of encouragement. I put excitement in my voice. I offered incentive (more on that later) for completing a week's worth of lessons. We kept at it.Around Lesson 8, something changed in my son. He caught on. A switch flipped in his little mind and he began putting the pieces together about slowly sounding out the letters without pausing...and noticing how he was suddenly READING A WORD! He was stunned. I was stunned. The method works, everyone. It is monotonous and repetitive, but it works. Sounding out the words without pauses between each letter is brilliant. The dot method used in this book is brilliant. He uses his fingers to move to each new dot and sound and it keeps his mind on track.This book has no frills. It looks boring and nothing like we'd think to buy for a small child. There are no colors or brilliant pictures. But it keeps their minds focused on the words and letters.This book is very quick. You can knock out lessons in 10-15 minutes once you've gotten the hang of them. We do them in carline as we wait to pick up his older sister from school.We're on Lesson 20, currently. My son has gone from not being able to read ANY words, to reading MANY words (2-4 letters) with ease.I've added on BOB Books after each lesson, and they are the perfect addition to these lessons. He has BLAZED through 2 boxes of BOB Books, and has begun picking them up and reading them on his own. I AM STUNNED.IT WORKS. Don't give up in the beginning because it is hard and frustrating, but I PROMISE, if you're doing your job and find a way to keep your child engaged (ENCOURAGE ENCOURAGE ENCOURAGE!)...they'll soon be so proud of what they can do! Updates on further lessons and progress to come!--------------------------------\UPDATE 3/11/18We are now up to Lesson 47. There have been many days where my son is doing so well and enjoying his progress so much that we do an additional lesson that day. I must say that this is truly shaping up to be the best book I could have ever bought for my son. I am stunned at the progress he is making!He knows the sounds well and can say them quickly without thinking. He is remembering old words and is able to quickly sound out new words due to his knowledge of the letter sounds. The orography used in the book is ingenious for helping little ones remember the different sounds some letters make.The lessons are all basically the same, but as the child progresses, they start to teach newer techniques such as "READING THE FAST WAY". Admittedly, we stumbled at first. It's a tricky thing to teach a young child to sound it out IN THEIR HEADS, and when the know the word, just say it fast. It took one or two days of frustration before he caught on....and now it's no problem! If you think about it, that's reading. We say the words in our head. This book just adds the step of having them say it out loud, too!Something I had thought about is addressed in the book as well. Some words are always said differently than how we sound them out. Words such as 'SAID' 'TO' 'OF'. The book teaches the child to sound it out first (as they always should)...but to then explain that it's a funny word that is spoken differently. There's honestly no other way to teach this to a child other than some words in the English language are just weird, lol!I'm impressed and very encouraged at my 5 year old's progress. New update around lesson 70!

I can count on one hand the number of reviews I've left, but I wanted to write this one for those who are on the fence. I started this program for my 3.5 year old, really only because he kept asking. I'm all about the play-based approach generally and had no desire for him to be reading, or to teach it to him and mess something up. My son's not in an academic preschool. He didn't know any but a few letters. He's bright and motivated, especially when things interest him (hello, knowing 100 dinosaurs by name), and he has some pre-reading skills (loving being read to, being able to rhyme and identify words that start with the same sound) but he can't sit still for two seconds, and I was dreading this whole thing.At lesson 40, I'm pretty amazed. This book has been wildly successful for him so far, but we've adapted a lot. He has always begged for reading lessons before we actually start one, but initially, would quickly grow frustrated or have real problems concentrating once they began. So after the first few lessons (which are shorter/easier and were novel), we started breaking them up into 2-3 chunks throughout the day and "gameifying" them. I also bought a bag of 100 mini dinosaurs from Amazon, and unashamedly give him a new toy after every lesson. So yep. Bribery. Also, "blending" sounds was our developmental roadblock. I almost abandoned the book around lesson 25 or so, when he still didn't have it. He was doing the rhyming exercises without a problem, and also learning all the individual phonics easily, but had real issues blending the sounds together. I've heard that blending tends to be the skill that makes or breaks the book and some kids just won't get it till later. For my son, it clicked around lesson 30 (though I had to scaffold- often covering up the first letter of a CVC word, so that he just had to do one blend instead of two, and then connecting it with the rhyming exercises he was so good at, by saying "'It', very good. Now rhyme 'it' with 'ssss'.") He still sometimes covers part of a word with his fingers when the whole thing is overwhelming, and does it piecemeal. But he's totally sounding everything out and it's an awesome thing to see. He can even sound out the two-syllable words, like "little". And now that the words are easy for him, the excitement is there, and he's much more able to sit through a whole lesson- sometimes even asks for two.I will say that I don't use the script a lot, and there are things we'll have to pick up in a second go, or from another source. Reading each story twice is too tedious. He doesn't have the motor skills to write, etc. And the focus on comprehension and fluency is something we'll have to keep working at- he sometimes forgets words from the beginning of the sentence because of the pace. But I think it's amazing that he's decoding so well. He hasn't missed a word or even needed help with one in the last three lessons. I do love that this is a phonics system. I didn't learn to read until in school and didn't use phonics- it made the idea of teaching reading opaque to me, since I wasn't sure how I actually learned to read myself. Phonics systematized it in a way that makes so much sense.I do want to mention that there are other books that I suspect are as or more effective, and might be a better fit for your child. Some are more comprehensive and move at a slower pace, many more "fun" (and the welltrainedmind forum is a great place to get the run down). If I were starting over, I might have chosen one of these, because, due to the age of my son and his temperament, I had to basically become a one-woman show to keep things engaging and positive. I also think, for us personally, approaching blending from several perspectives, and maybe in a more gamefied manner, while providing more practice on one-blend words ("if," "on", etc.) would have helped crystallize things for him sooner/less painfully. As it was, I did a lot of supplemental oral blending work- breaking words up orally when in the care, reverse blending etc., and I think it helped, though I'm really not sure what made it all finally click. Once it did? Smooth sailing. And it clicked all at once- from getting every word wrong, to rarely stumbling. Kind of awesome to see.Some final notes about moving beyond the book: it's apparently very common for kids to drop off around lesson 50, when the length and difficulty of the stories goes up significantly. My suspicion is we'll be ok here, because he really can sound out just about anything in each lesson, and now that he's succeeding, has a lot more patience to try (plus, we're fine with breaking it up if not). But we'll see. The second major drop off comes after Lessons 70-80 where the names of all letters, and the capital letter forms are introduced over about three lessons, and where the special orthography that helps with pronunciation disappears. I think this might pose a bigger problem for us, since he doesn't know capital letters or letter names already- and learning all that quickly will be a stretch, and the specialized script really does help. The specialized script, for me, is a bit of a love-hate thing. It's definitely a useful tool, but it makes using any easy readers or complementary systems really hard. Reading a "real book" is so much more motivating for him now, but many of the readers I've seen (Bob, or I am Sam books) aren't a great match, since they introduce letters at different times, have a different orthography (e.g., no hat on the a), and don't use phonics-based script. There's just a lot of new information- and he struggles at even the simplest readers. It'd be great if there were accompanying readers you could use in tandem with this book- because there's a difference between reading a few sentences, and reading a "real book"- a big one.I know there are a lot of caveats in this review, but my kid is reading a full two years before kindergarten, due to ten minutes of practice every few days over a single summer. And he's excited about reading more each day. Really hard to give less than five stars there.Update one year later:So my suspicions were right here. Once you get past Lesson 70 or so, the pace is brutal for a kid that doesn't know his alphabet already. The book is still throwing new phonic sounds at you, but also expects the kids to learn lowercase and capital letters as well as the names of all letters, AND drop the special orthography- all very suddenly. It was too much, the last one especially, and we put reading away. He sort of lost his motivation, and I had no urge to work on this before he was ready, so I dropped it. I did kind of expect that the skills he'd picked up would help him transition to reading regular books on his own through the year. That didn't happen. He forgot a lot of what the book covered, and really just remained content with me reading to him.We returned to it this summer, with him age 4.5 knowing about 80% of the letter names, capitals and lower case included, and it was a whole different thing. He now has the motor skills to write, his ability to comprehend and retain what he reads is excellent, and he loves the lessons and flies through them in 5 minutes. His attention span is still that of a four year old, but no more one woman show required for him to sit through one- just some mile redirection. Most key, instead of being an insurmountable challenge,dropping the specialized orthography was a small hurdle, easily cleared. He's done with the book now, and taken off with reading in a way I suspect will stick with him. I'm sure doing it last year helped with foundation skills. And I wonder if we could've made it through a year earlier if he'd known his alphabet better. But I'm pretty happy with how things went. I do suspect, just because of how easy it was at age 4.5, that 3.5 was a little early for us. Maybe I could've made it through, but better to just wait till there's interest, it's fun and painless. That's what it was this summer.