PAL...anyone used this for awhile now..likes? dislikes?

[Blessed with seven]

I am wanting to do PAL but am curious if anyone has used it for awhile, it would mainly be for ds6 and dd8.

 

Kim

 

I love the "idea" because we are going to use AAS but...I don't like the time consuming thing, is it easy to skip certain parts of the reading and move forward at a quicker pace?

 

Would it be good to fill in some phonics gaps for my 8 year old?

[JeannineW]

I just finished all 80 of the PAL Reading lessons with my daughter. She is almost 5 1/2. When we began, she was working on CVC words. She really enjoyed PAL and is reading pretty well. She is trying to read all sorts of things that are no where near her reading level. I love it!

 

I'm homeschooling four kids so she didn't get nearly the time it says. She picked up on things pretty quickly so we did a lot less than it said as far as repetition of the games and such. I thought it was much better and much less "painful" than the other programs I've used. We are still continuing with the loose pattern of the lessons because she enjoyed it so much and still could use some reinforcement.

 

We are also doing PAL Writing. We have proceeded a lot more slowly until recently so we are just a few lessons into Part 2. I'm really impressed with the writing part and look forward to working on it with her. We love the IEW writing program, and it's a great way to ease her into it.

 

We also use AAS, and it fits nicely with PAL.

 

I would think it would be great for your kids. You could teach your 6 yo and your 8 yo could be your assistant. As far as time consuming, it is what you make of it. I only did 2 -3 lessons a week. You can break the lessons up in any way that works for you.

 

I think I answered your questions. If you have anymore, ask away.

[Blessed with seven]

Oh..thank you so much!

 

 

I do have another question, people have said it is phonics and "whole word"....are there a LOT of "sight" words?

 

Kim

[JeannineW]

Yes, but only a few at a time. I think you add 2-4 per lesson. I think the sight words are what make is so great. When they learn so many sight words, they can read so much more easily. They don't have to sound out EVERY SINGLE WORD. At the same time, they are learning all the phonics so they CAN sound out words. It's a great mix.

 

If that part doesn't appeal to you, you could skip it or minimize it. Once we got to "critical mass" maybe 20-25 cards, we started removing as many cards as we added. So, if we added two new ones, we removed two that she had mastered.

[Blessed with seven]

Sounds great...thank you so much. I just placed my order...

 

Kim

[Cindyz]

We are using the PAL writing. Honestly, I am not loving it. We finished Part 2 and have moved on to Part 3. It seems like a big leap from Part 2 to Part 3. If we hadn't been doing other writing programs with copywork, dictation, journal writing in the past, I don't see how he could have gone from Part 2 directly to Part 3. We are not able to do Part 3 in the amount of time suggested in the guide. There's a lot of writing. Just making the first outline was a lot of writing. There's no information given about how to create a sentence, or what constitutes a paragraph. I don't know. It just feels like it's missing a lot of information and is trying to force young children into writing without all of the necessary tools before doing so.