What age for All About Reading Pre-Reading (and any reviews?)

[lasfresasrojas]

Hello!
 

I was just wondering if anyone has used All About Reading Pre-1/Pre-Reading and your thoughts on it. What age did you find it best for? Did you like it?

 

Thanks so much!

[mmasc]

We used it for my DS who had just turned 5, so kindergarten. I did the placement and he wasn't solid enough on his letters to skip the pre-level. I liked it and thought it was good at introducing letters and sounds through simple games and worksheets. The worksheets were good at first, but my son grew bored with the repetitive set up. I didn't want to 'rush', but in hindsight I think I would have made it about a half year program, then moved on to reading after Christmas. My DS3 did a lot of the AAR with us and seemed to enjoy it also.

Not sure if that helps any. :) I can answer specific questions if needed.

[lasfresasrojas]

We used it for my DS who had just turned 5, so kindergarten. I did the placement and he wasn't solid enough on his letters to skip the pre-level. I liked it and thought it was good at introducing letters and sounds through simple games and worksheets. The worksheets were good at first, but my son grew bored with the repetitive set up. I didn't want to 'rush', but in hindsight I think I would have made it about a half year program, then moved on to reading after Christmas. My DS3 did a lot of the AAR with us and seemed to enjoy it also.

Not sure if that helps any. :) I can answer specific questions if needed.

 

Thank you! I am thinking about using it for a 3.5 yr old that already solidly knows all of her letters, and their sounds, but obviously isn't ready for "actual reading" yet.

 

She keeps asking for more and more school, so I want to keep fostering her love for learning without pushing too hard :)

[mmasc]

Instead of having my DS3 (almost 4) do AAR pre-level again, I purchased Happy Phonics. It's basically all games/activities that focus on phonics and beginning reading. If your DD knows her letters and sounds, this might be a good fit before reading too. Just another option to check out! :)

[lasfresasrojas]

Instead of having my DS3 (almost 4) do AAR pre-level again, I purchased Happy Phonics. It's basically all games/activities that focus on phonics and beginning reading. If your DD knows her letters and sounds, this might be a good fit before reading too. Just another option to check out! :)

 

Thank you! I will definitely look into it!

[vaquitita]

Nm

Edited December 13, 2015 by vaquitita

[happycc]

This was incredibly repetitive and boring and we combined the last two sections because it was the never ending curriculum for us. (Maybe it because I have been doing phonics for 20 some years. I really hate teaching reading.)

 

My son was balking when doing it with me. It was really hard to get him focused on it. 

 

Plus I found the crafts boring and for some reason annoying but I could tell he was learning from it and enjoyed the craft component. 

 

SO, here was my solution. I handed the craft pages to my 12 yrs old to do with him. They enjoyed it much more than me doing it with him and my son enjoyed doing it with their sisters than with me. My girls enjoyed doing it because it was fun and not hard school work they normally have to do. 

They also played the phonemic games with him after awhile. Last third of the book. 

 

SO hand that craft sheet over to grandma, siblings, whoever to save your sanity. 

[SMRB]

We used it when DD was 3. She was solid on recognizing letters and very good with her letter sounds. We afterschool and have limited time, so we only did the activities in the teacher's manual and ditched the activity/craft book after the first lesson. We did use the picture cards for the games. We did not like the Zigzag Zebra reader, mainly because DD was so good on letter sounds already, and the readings were much too short for her. We definitely did not strictly follow the program. DD's favorite part was the Ziggy puppet and any game with rhyming. She loved when Ziggy made mistakes, and she still asks to play rhyming games with him almost 2 years later. She came out an amazing rhymer, which is making learning reading much faster and easier. We probably could have gotten by just fine with only the teacher's manual and the Ziggy puppet, though.

[serendipitous journey]

We did this when N. was three, and it went pretty well.  We zoomed through some bits and took others slowly, and at the end I think he was a bit sick of it so I don't think we finished everything.  After it was done we started AAR1, when he was about 4, and are taking that very gently; it is a program he likes. 

 

A. did will with Phonics Pathways, but N. detested it; you could look at it, I checked it out via our library before purchasing for A.  The trouble for N. was that Phonics Pathways uses a lot of nonsense words esp. at first, and he likes meaning!  The older fellow was a symbol dude, so it worked very well for him. 

 

I also want to use AAS with N., so this makes sense. 

[Guest ummMohsin]

I think the AAR pre is for ages 3.5 to 4. AAR 1 is usually for grade K. I haven't tried the pre, but AAR level 2 is very nice.

[ByGrace3]

It is different or every child. My ds used it at the beginning of K at 5. He knew letters and sounds but needed more phonemic awareness before AAR1. He completed pre level in about 5-6 weeks and we moved on to 1. My dd is using pre level now at 4. She wasn't ready for it at 3, but it is perfect or her now. It all depends on the child's readiness.

[wendyroo]

My (almost) 3.5 year old, Elliot, knows all his uppercase letters and most of his lower case letters.  He knows the 26 primary phonograms, however he has pretty severe speech issues, and therefore cannot accurately produce many of the sounds.  He can often identify the first or last sound in a word, but he has not yet mastered rhyming or blending.

 

When my older son, Peter, was at exactly this same stage, I vacillated between AAR pre-level and AAR1.  I decided pre-level was much too expensive for a child who knew almost all the information and did not like crafts.  I got AAR1, but found that it introduced material much too slowly for my son, and yet also expected much more stamina and fluency than he was capable of.  It took us a month to get through lessons 1 and 2, but by then Peter had completely figured out blending and was able to read any CVC, CCVC or CVCC word...trudging through the rest of AAR1 seemed pointless, so we moved to a mixture of Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading (skipping past things he already knew) and Explode the Code.  Peter is now reading at a second grade level.

 

With Elliot, I have decided to start him with the Explode the Code pre-books (Get Ready, Get Set and Go for the Code) and then move into Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading (skipping the part on letter sounds) and Explode the Code 1 when he ready to begin blending (and hopefully his speech has improved somewhat).  The Explode the Code pre-books focus on lower case letters, phonemic awareness, beginning handwriting and visual discrimination (circle all the letters that match).  While we are going through the pre-books I am also casually working with him on rhyming and simple oral blending games (I'm thinking of an animal whose name starts with /tie/ and ends with /ger/).

 

Wendy

[Tawlas]

I did it with my son for pre-K, so he was 4. After listening in on me teaching his older brother to read for the last few years, I didn't realize how much he already know about letters! I ended up only doing the first half (upper case letters) because we talked about letter sounds with them, so the second half seemed redundant. We just switched over to the lowercase letter alphabet chart so he'd recognize them as well. But he liked the little crafts, mostly because I did them with him I think, and he especially enjoyed the word games. Once I realized it would be redundant to go through all the letters in lower case, I began to pick up some of the games in the second half of the book, even though we didn't use the pages.

 

I've saved the second half of the book and will likely do it with my daughter when she's reading. That pre-K son is now in kindergarten and flying through AAR1. I've done OPGTR with the two eldes and have recently switched m older son over to AAR2 as a sort of review and consolidate phonics and it's working very nicely :) Happy All About Learning Customer here!

[MotherGoose]

If she already knows her letters and sounds I would not use the pre-level. She may be ready for "real" reading taken slowly. My dd knew letters and sounds at 3.5 and started reading shortly before she turned 4. I haven't used any other levels of AAR but I used OPGTR (wtih some modifications like magnetic letters and such to make it more fun) with both of mine. OPGTR is a much cheaper way to teach than AAR :) I used AAR pre-level with my other, younger dd, at about 4 and it was fine, but she didn't know her letters and sounds. You can always go slowly with a 3.5 yo and put it away for awhle if it becomes tiresome for her.