R&S Reading/Bible

[HomesteadMommy]

I'm looking at R&S reading/Bible books right now. I'm planning to get the grade 4 "Exploring With God", for my 9 yo dd starting gr 4 this fall. It looks perfect for her.

 

But I was sidetracked into looking at the grade 1 and 2 programs. :tongue_smilie: This year I'll have a grade 4, 2, 1 and k4. Just going by the samples online I think that the reading part of the 2nd grade "Stories About God's People", might be to hard/long for my dd7. But the phonics worksheet samples look ok.

She is about 3/4's through 100 Easy Lessons, but still has a bit of trouble remembering some sounds. But has been doing much better lately.

 

So I looked at their grade 1 package "We Learn About God", I think this might work well for both girls in grade 1 and 2.

It's much more expensive then their other reading programs, but more affordable if it would work for both girls.

 

So I would love to hear from anyone who has used their grade 1 or 2 reading program. I've looked at the samples, but I'm still not sure how all the parts go together.

What would an average lesson look like?

How long are the lessons?

How does R&S teach phonics? The description says it covers both phonics and site words.

 

I'm thinking it would be good review for dd7, but still have enough challenge.

I'm soon going to be starting 100 EL with dd5 (will be 6 this fall), so we might have this done before we start our new year this fall.

 

Sorry if I'm rambling, it's after 1 AM here and my heads spinning from reading all the curriculum descriptions all night. :lol:

[5LittleMonkeys]

I used the grade 2 - Stories About God's People with dd8 at the beginning of this year. She loved the stories but got frustrated with the workbook pretty quickly. It was just too much seatwork for her at the time and she complained that the workbook was boring. It was extrememly time consuming. Do the pre-reading activity in the workbook, read the story, do the post-reading activity in the workbook...it took way to much time for us. I would say that it took about 40 minutes. She was just starting to read well though so that factors in to how much time it took. We tried to break it up to two days but then there was no way we would get through the whole program in a year. It is set up to do one lesson a day for 36 weeks, if I remember correctly. We didn't use the phonics portion of it.

 

I liked the program and would actually like to try it again with her when she is able to do much of the workbook on her own and be able to work through it more quickly.

[G5052]

Not a popular choice on these boards, but it worked very well with my oldest and we kept on with it. My children are excellent spellers and read at an adult level.

 

The reading and phonics in 1st and 2nd grade really go together. They do use some sight words, but I was fine with that. They are also workbook-based which can be a problem for some kids.

 

The biggest key for us was to pace to the child. There were indeed many days that we did only one page in the phonics book and one page in the reading book. When we only did a partial lesson in the reading book, we read the passage again the next day, and then finished the lesson. I also took breaks at times and used magnetic letters, Phonics Pathways, etc. etc. when we just weren't getting it. As they advanced, we also checked out lots and lots of easy readers from the library.

 

I did not continue with it past 2nd grade though. I prefer Christian Light's stories and poems at that point, and we've used their 2nd-7th grade readers now and are pleased with them.

[HomesteadMommy]

Thanks! One of the reasons I am interested in the grade 1/2 program is I'd like to uses it as their Bible study as well.

My kids like workbooks (I don't! LOL) so I don't think they would mind that approach. We do a lot of reading together with history etc already to get living books in.

 

Is it the layout of the workbook pages some kids find boring? We us MEP for math so our girls are used to pages that aren't full of color.

 

My oldest daughter finished 100 EL, then didn't need any further phonic practice. She's a strong reader naturally.

When I first started using 100 EL with dd7 last year (was 5/6 then) she wanted to read so bad, but just wasn't ready. We put it aside and restarted this spring. She's picked it up much quicker, but could still use some practice.

I'm seeing the same thing with dd5 (6 in the fall), she learns in a similar way to dd7.

[simka2]

I have used there 1st grade materials with 2 kids. It was a total flop with my first (so bad she ended up in ps:glare:) and it is going okay with my second. The difference is I gave my youngest a thorough foundation in Leap Frog and HOP, before attempting it!

 

The sight words can make it vey difficult and frustrating. Honestly for 1st I love the math and handwriting. I would not have purchased the reading/phonics again, but I already had it.

[Clear Creek]

What would an average lesson look like?

Grade 1 Reading has a short Bible story that the student will read and then a two-page workbook lesson. The workbook lesson will go over the new words that were in the story (match them with their meaning, put them in alphabetical order, etc.), have some sort of comprehension questions about the story (yes or no, short answer, circle the correct answer, full sentence answer), and beginning grammar skills are introduced (identify sentences and phrases, put capital letters and ending marks on the ones that are sentences, copy the title with correct capitalization). The skills progress through the year so that the child can correctly answer a question with a complete sentence written in the correct format by the end of the year. Sometimes we did an exercise orally, but most of the time the lesson was short enough that my children would do it written without complaint.

 

Grade 2 Reading has a Bible story followed by several pages of work in the workbook. There is a pre-reading section which is meant to be done after the oral class time (where the new words are discussed) and a section to be done after the reading. It is way, way, way too long for a 2nd grader to do the entire lesson. I would do the oral discussion with my child and then do a couple of whatever the pre-reading exercise was in the book and then after we read and discussed the story my child would do select exercises from the second section in the workbook lesson. I would do that each day until Unit 4 when she had reached a point that she could do each lesson completely without a problem (and without it taking an excessive amount of time). I don't know what the publishers were thinking, but there is more work in the 2nd grade workbook per lesson than there is in the 3rd or 4th grade workbooks, so I didn't feel bad at all about cutting about half of it out. I just made sure she worked on the skills that she needed to work on and ignored the rest. It did cover a lot of good skills, though, so I am using it again this coming fall with my second child.

 

 

How does R&S teach phonics? The description says it covers both phonics and site words.

The sight words are really words for which the phonics rules will eventually be taught that are introduced prior to the phonics rule being formally presented. Having taught through phonics a couple of times now I don't treat them as sight words, I just state the phonics rule when they read the word for the first time.

 

The phonics lessons are awesome. The new rule is introduced (or a rule is reviewed), there are two pages of exercises where the rule is used, there is a column of words on the side of the second page which the child has to read (really read, there is no context in which to guess the word, and the rules from previous lessons are mixed in), and on the bottom of the second page is a short spelling lesson. Common words are taught and reviewed there. After my child completed the lesson we would flip to the previous day's lesson and see how many words she could read from that column in one minute...it vastly improved her reading speed, and by the end of the year she could read all twenty-something words in less than a minute. Units 4 & 5 also have two sentences for dictation that include a word or two that follow the phonics rule for the day.

 

I have used the phonics after teaching both of my older children to read using 100EZ Lessons. I like 100EZ because it teaches blending really well and gets them started on reading, and R&S Phonics because it covers all the phonics rules that are not expressly taught in 100EZ. R&S Phonics and Reading go hand-in-hand together...words for which my child had just learned the rule for in phonics would appear in her story several days later.

[HomesteadMommy]

I have used the phonics after teaching both of my older children to read using 100EZ Lessons. I like 100EZ because it teaches blending really well and gets them started on reading, and R&S Phonics because it covers all the phonics rules that are not expressly taught in 100EZ. R&S Phonics and Reading go hand-in-hand together...words for which my child had just learned the rule for in phonics would appear in her story several days later.

 

Thank you for giving me a great look into both grades! I'm pretty sure we are going to give the grade 1 a try with both girls.

They should both be done 100EZ by the time I would be starting R&S this fall. Sounds like it would be a good reinforcement of what they've learned so far.

[Ellie]

Although the readers are ok, I cannot recommend using the whole Nurture and Bible Reader series. The phonics is true phonics, but there is no good reason to teach sight words. Children are supposed to memorize over 200 words and over 200 phrases. ACK.

 

Use something else for phonics--OPGTR, Phonics Pathways, AlphaPhonics, Spalding and its spin-offs--and use the readers if you want to. Or use just the phonics workbooks and add the readers later. But not the "reading" workbooks and stuff.