All About Reading Pre-Reading Recap and Review
In the Charlotte Mason homeschool world its common to delay formal lessons until age 6. When my daughter was young, I hadn’t quite “met” Miss Mason yet and we weren't sure if we were going to homeschool long term. A key part of our beginning homeschool journey was the fact that we couldn’t afford preschool. Since we weren’t sold on homeschool yet, I wanted to make sure my daughter was prepared for kindergarten, which means I ignored Mason’s advice.
After consulting the only homeschooling friend I had at the time, I decided to use All About Reading Pre-Reading.
From the website: “All About Reading is Based on the Orton-Gillingham approach, these multisensory programs teach through a logical sequence that leaves no gaps in the learning process. Best of all, these methods benefit all types of learners—not just those who struggle.”
We started when my daughter was about to turn 4 and took our time over 10 months to finish. The results were fairly astonishing.
N went from little letter recognition to knowing all her letters and letter sounds. We were able to quickly begin All About Reading Level 1 and Miss 10 was able to read fluently before she was 5.
Fast forward 5 years and I dusted off a new to me copy of All About Reading Pre-Reading (graciously passed down from a friend since I gave our copy away) for my 4 year old son, EJ. If there’s ever such a thing as “children are born persons” (Charlotte Mason) the difference in my two children show it. We are now firm in our decision to homeschool and yet I still ignored Mason’s advice about delaying formal lessons.
EJ is the type of kid who will not be ignored or left out for any reason. When he saw his big sister doing lessons he wanted his own school too.
While Mason proposed the delay of formal education until the age of 6 she didn’t expect children to be uneducated. In fact, in her list of attainments for a child under the age of 6 she even says a child should be able to read. She also notes that how much and what are up to the child.
EJ is currently 4.5 years old and has finished All About Reading Pre-Reading. His results are vastly different than his sister’s.
He knows about 75% of his letters (uppercase and lowercase) and about 50% of his letter sounds. While this program didn't provide him mastery in letter recognition it did offer a lot of benefits:
Connection time: EJ loved having the time with me to work on something special just for him.
Habit building: Taking 10 minutes a day to do a reading lessons was a wonderful experience in habit formation. EJ learned how to come to the table and work for a short period of time. This has helped with things like reading longer chapter books.
Rhyming Words: One of the early literary skills is understanding rhyming words which he was able to understand perfectly. It’s pretty cute to hear him make up his own rhyming games.
Syllables and Sentence Segmenting: Another early literary skill EJ was able to grasp was understanding and clapping syllables in a word and counting the number of words in a sentence.
Isolating Beginning and Ending Sounds: EJ was also able to understand and isolate the beginning and ending sounds of a word.
What I loved about All About Reading
All About Reading Pre-Reading gives a firm foundation in early reading skills for both parents and children. If you’ve never taught a child how to read, this program helps hold your hand in a good way.
The emphasis on phonetic awareness. As a former teacher, I can say, phonetic based reading is important for a child to learn how and establish good reading skills.
Multi-sensory approach. This program combines oral, visual, and kinesthetic learning to help children learn their letters and sounds.
More than letters: AAR Pre-reading includes skills in rhyming, learning syllables and segmenting sentences which is important in early literary.
Ziggy! Ziggy the puppet was hands down the favorite of both of my children. EJ (age 4) is so excited to have Ziggy to play with now.
So while EJ needs a little more time to work on letter recognition before we’re reading you move on to Level 1, I still found the time we spent working on All About Reading worthy.
