Thanks to the generosity of All About Learning Press, we just completed our first week of All About Reading Level 1 with Alex.
It has been a really fun week. While we’ve tried other reading programs, All About Reading is BY FAR the most fun I’ve ever had teaching reading - either as a classroom teacher or as a mama. Alex really enjoyed it, too!
Take a look at the pictures found in this post – I never asked Alex to smile for a picture; these are all natural smiles from a little boy who is having fun while he learns!
All About Learning recommends using a 2’ by 3’ magnetic board for the letter tiles. We have a magnetic board hanging on the wall in our school area, but we’ve opted to use the letter tiles on a cookie sheet for now. That way, we can put the tiles up on a shelf after each lesson. In this house, there are still too many little fingers that would love to wander away with pretty alphabet magnets!
Alex came into the program already knowing how to blend CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words, so these early days are just right him. Because of that, we were able to complete 4 lessons this week. I wanted to start from the beginning to make sure we were getting the full AAR instruction, and the extra practice will only help build Alex’s fluency in reading these words.
I imagine we will slow down the pace a bit before long, but the novelty of a new program and the fact that he’s already familiar with blending short words have made it easy to go at a quick pace for now.
Alex really enjoyed reading and sorting the rhyming words into the correct ice cream cones.
My little boy, who doesn’t care too much for coloring, was SO excited to color different flavors of ice cream for everyone in our family. He couldn’t wait to show this page to Daddy!
This monster page was, BY FAR, his favorite AAR activity of the week. He was having so much fun that he forgot that he was learning.
Here is Alex, making me laugh and practicing his reading while we did this fun monster activity. He was pretending to BE the monster while he read the words. My favorite is when he got to the word ‘dad’. The monster’s reaction was pretty cute :D
Yes, he is still really working at recognizing the difference between lowercase b and d.
This is addressed in the AAR Level 1 manual, and we are working on it!
Also, I have no idea why he read ‘can’ backwards – he did the first 8 words without any difficulty – but I couldn’t resist posting this video of him having fun!
It’s even fun seeing how many word cards he can read correctly on the first try!
He loves to put the star on his achievement chart at the end of each lesson.
Next week Monday, Alex will have his first experience with READING A STORY in the first All About Reading book. He is so excited to read a full story all by himself!
We’ll continue to update every few weeks, definitely with pictures and occasionally with videos, to let you know how it’s going as Alex and I continue with All About Reading Level 1.
Disclosure: We received a free copy of All About Reading Level 1 and the Interactive Kit in exchange for blogging our experience with the program. The links in this post are affiliate links, and I will receive a commission for each purchase made through these links. All opinions are my own.