First Start Reading

With my 1st grader, I needed a new phonics curriculum this year.  For personal reasons, but also because her language skills are still a bit delayed, we just needed a fresh start, and we decided to try First Start Reading by Memoria Press.  I have 4ish phonics programs on my shelf right now, so we thought we would start with this and then go on to something else if it wasn't working. 

I have always appreciated how straight forward and easy to follow Memoria Press curriculum tend to be, and First Start Reading has been no exception.  She is doing great with this curriculum.  I am starting her in book B.  We went back to the end of book A, and she could pretty easily read the material there, and could honestly start further in to book B, but I wanted to start her off easy, build confidence, and then move into new material. 

This curriculum gives a short lesson each day.  I appreciate the limited time involvement, and that I need to do no prep work beforehand.  I also love that the stories you read each week are 7-8 lines of text on a page, instead of little readers like you typically see.  I have always had issues with my beginning readers being more interested in the pictures on the page and being too distracted to read the words or guessing at the words based on the pictures.  I usually fold the page back and cover the picture anyway.  With this curriculum, there are no distractions.  There is one picture to go with each story, but it is on the opposite page.  What you read is actually all on one page, one sentence per line.  The teacher's book gives you comprehension questions and discussion starters for each line to make sure the student stays on task and is comprehending what she is reading.  There is also lots of opportunity for the student to draw the scene they just read about, which this child loves.  Some of mine hate coloring, but this particular child loves it. 

All in all, I have found the program to be simple and straightforward.  It doesn't have a lot of the bells and whistles of some other programs we have used, but that is honestly what I was looking for with her.  She wants to read and doesn't need the distraction that other programs provide.  The super short lessons work well with my time.  If she was a very beginning reader, this program might not provide enough reinforcement early on, but for where we are, it has been a great fit.  When she gets through book C and has the basic phonics rules down, we will move onto something to build more fluency. 

Teaching reading has always been my most dreaded task of homeschooling, but so far this year, my kids and this curriculum are making it easy on me.