Marie Rippel and All About Spelling during my first voyage with TOS Homeschool Crew. All About Spelling made my top 10 list for the year, one of my very favorites, and when I learned that we'd be getting one of the new readers to review, my expectations were high.Disclosure: I was given a copy of the new Beehive Reader to use and review with my homeschooler.
I think Marie Rippel hung the moon! ;) All About Spelling gets an A+ from me -- and the Beehive Reader is the same high quality. She thought of everything in this book!
She "gets" the challenges we face when we have children who struggle with academics, and this reader is a problem solver for folks like me.
The Behive Reader is a little hardback book, 160 pages long, just the right size for little hands. It's a nice weight. The 10 stories inside are phonics based. Rippel found that most easy readers throw in sight words that are difficult to decode, creating challenges and negative experiences for struggling readers. She's written the Beehive Reader without those suprise sight words.It can be used as a stand-alone or with the first level of All About Spelling.
The illustrations are adorable, and they offer opportunities to simply talk about the pictures together, parent and child.
The pages are nonglare. The font was customized and letters like p's and q's are easily distinguished from one another.
The text is written in short phrases that are meant to be read a phrase at a time, where the natural phrase break is at the end of a line.
To help the reader with visual tracking, the text is lightly underlined.
My daughter balks if she sees too many words on a page. I haven't quite figured out what her definition of "too many words" is, but she knows it -- and she has been known to shut down because a page of text appeared too difficult, simply because there was so much text! Rippel does a nice job balancing text w/ the illustrations for our situation.
The Beehive Reader is priced at $19.95, available here.
To read the reviews of the Beehive Reader by my Crewmates, check out TOS Crew Blog.
2 comments:
Another program that works well with children with learning disabilities such as autism is Reading Horizons At Home. This program focuses on a unique method of decoding each word. The program is very simple and straight-forward and very effective. This article explains how it works for autistic children: http://www.readinghorizonsathome.com/autism-dip.aspx
All About Spelling made most of our Top Ten lists on the Crew last year -- including those of us w/ kids w/ special learning needs. I highly recommend it -- I love their Beehive Reader! :)
Post a Comment