Pathway Readers vs. McGuffey

I wouldn’t consider Pathway’s living books exactly, but not as bad as Dick and Jane, either. They are wholesome, however. Pathways aren’t as good as McGuffey’s in quality of language and literary writings within the books themselves for the children to become familiar with. Also, there’s the teaching of patriotism that McGuffey’s help to develop in additon to character development.

What I consider living books, other than Mcguffey’s for that age group, is the Elson Readers. Definitely living book reading.

Mine used all three series; but Elson and McGuffey’s held their interest for the longest over the years, but Pathways was a good contribution to wholesome, albeit simplistic, reading.

We started using the McGuffey readers because they were free (at gutenberg.org).  DH was in school at the time and I didn’t have money for an expensive phonics program.  After seeing how well they worked for her, I kept using them with my younger DC (and picked up a set of printed books).  

We have a couple of the Pathway readers and I will probably use them with DD5 as well, but I love that the McGuffey readers go through high school level.  The material in the upper levels is really good!  It isn’t just a reader, but a collection of great literature!  There are many well known writers included.  I can also have them use it for copywork, dictation, grammar, or memory work.

I’ve heard good things about the Pathway readers as well, so I don’t think you’d go wrong with either one! 

I’m not sure if this is “okay”, but we just skip over the symbols.  I’ve never used the symbols at all, and my older two are reading just fine.  I point out new words in the passage itself (where there are no symbols) before reading or just wait and let her sound out new words on her own, correcting her as needed.  Usually I only point out a new word if it isn’t easily read phonetically.  

We have discussed how old the books are and I sometimes explain things further as they come up.  It doesn’t take more than a minute and they’ve gotten a bit of history as well!  We’ve read quite a few Little House books, so they have a pretty good grasp of those days and usually don’t have questions…I think I bring things up more than them.

We actually just read the passage about the mending and reading last fall.  We had a fun time compairing it to our evening!

Where have you all purchased McGuffey’s at a reasonble price? I think I have them on my Kindle but not sure.

Thanks!

My3boys, I just got an ipad this week. Last night I downloaded the files of several McGuffey readers into my iBooks app from the Gutenburg site. There are more than 3, if you search McGuffey on the book search they will all show up, maybe it is 6 readers. I wasn’t planning to use them, but after reading this thread I’ve decided to try them after we finish the Reading Made Easy with Blend Phonics program. I think having dc read off the ipad screen will be easier than on the smaller kindle.

tbkim2 — are you saying that the PDF or the ePub is the better edition, visually?

On the topc as a whole, I admit that even though I own a lovely set of McGuffey’s and use them with my littlest guy learning to read, I never used the higher levels because it seemed like it was a lot of excerpts and I kept feeling like I wanted my older kids to connect with entire works rather than an excerpt (although I did like the elocution focus points). No disrespect to anyone who loves them 🙂  and maybe I will end up using the higher levels with some of my younger crew. But just thought I’d share an alternate opinion on it.

We also did use Pathway readers through More Days Gone By or the level after that, but that was it. It is hard to find reasonably interesting stories for those young readers, expecially stories that are completely new to their eyes, so I really appreciate Pathway for that. Once they are more fluent, there always seems to be plenty of regular literature to keep them busy. 

I agree that the children will move into literature, but I think it’s always good to have a book (whether a reader, literature, or poetry) for them to practice reading aloud from so that they don’t lose pronunciation, enunciation, and elocution.