WP Users...please help...

[Tree House Academy]

I have decided to use Winter Promise Fast-Track Phonics with my ds5 and then move on in to LA1. My question is, should I finish LLATL blue with him first or just go right into the Fast-Track. We are just in the first few pages of ETC book 3 right now, so the Fast-Track is exactly where he is working. Any advice would be great! Thanks!!

[Tree House Academy]

:lurk5:

[chiguirre]

Well, since no one else has answered, I'll give it a go. I tried WP Adv. K with dd and WP 1 with ds in January. We lasted about 4 weeks with dd and 6 weeks with ds. Dd decided she liked LLATL Blue better and we're back to that and adding in Calvert's Houghton Mifflin readers and workbooks (those are a big hit w/dd because they're colorful). Ds lasted longer because I do like ETC and Right into Reading (this is such a great workbook) but the readers that WP used were instilling word guessing in ds, a habit I really want to avoid. The Nora Gaydos readers are great and dd still uses them for fun, but the levelled readers in Level One are not a good fit for ds because there are too many unfamiliar and not easily sounded out words. We read 5 readers between the AW and AS suggestions and the word guessing kept getting worse. In the end I went back to Pathway readers to get ds back on track about looking carefully at the words. You could avoid this problem by creating your own new word lists, but they're not included in WP's LA and you would have to spend the time on making them. There would also be many more new words in a lesson than you find with Pathway readers or Houghton Mifflin texts. Before I bought the WP 1 LA I would get the readers from the library and test run them with a child to see if they would work well.

 

IMHO, WP has some good elements, but overall the program doesn't hang together that well. I wish I hadn't gone that route with ds and I'm glad I picked up the problem quickly before bad habits became more ingrained. The really weird thing is that he has done fine with LLATL Red, Pathway and the SL 2nd grade readers. The only difference with the WP readers is the amount of words that he couldn't sound out easily. Why Mouse Soup, Amelia Bedelia and the Beginner's Bible work fine and Pocahontas and Giant Squid don't is a mystery to me, but the experiment went so badly that I would not use those books with dd for reading instruction. Of course, YMMV, but I thought I'd let you know about our experience in case you see the same thing happening.

[SnowWhite]

I think if you are SET on going with Fast Track, it won't hurt to go ahead and start. You can always sneak in the parts of LLATL that you want and like, and do the Fast Track on a Slow Track, LOL.

 

My ds did WP LA1 and did not have any difficulty with word guessing. I have never heard that there is a jump between Adv K (or Fast Track) and WP LA1, but I am sure no program is perfect for everyone. I'm glad to be warned that this has happened to someone, as I will be on the lookout for it with second ds.

 

My first ds did Pathway Readers and Learning Through Sounds, Before We Read, Helping Yourself for his K year. He was finished with Pathway Readers Days Go By (the second of 3 first grade readers) when we started WP LA1.

 

On the WP LA Placement Evaluation Guide, it references a "key turn" moment in a child's school years when reading becomes less about decoding and more innate. IMO it is critical that a student reaches that key turn moment before doing WP LA1, but I know of a couple students on the WP forum who did okay with LA1 after struggling through the first few readers as well.

 

I think with teaching reading to children it's important not to get hung up on age/grade levels and meet the child at their ability level. I'm not going to stress if my ds5 in the fall spends a full year on WP Basic K phonics and then a full year on Adv K phonics, to do LA1 during the year he's doing Math 2. YKWIM?

[Tree House Academy]

I was thinking that Fast Track could be done at the same time as what we are doing now (just add it in and keep going). LLATL is working for ds5 right now, but I don't intend on going on with LLATL through the later years, so I want to find something NOW that I like better. Fast-Track includes ETC 3 and we have just started ETC 3, so I intend to find where it starts and begin from there if possible. Also, I thought fast-track may be a good way to introduce ds to the way WP teaches phonics without the stress of trying to use the 1st grade curruculum too.

 

I hate to say it, but LLATL blue is NOT really 1st grade work, IMO and it seems to leave kids ill prepared to go on into a true 2nd grade program.