Pathway Readers Workbooks and Teacher's Manuals?

If I remember rightly, the workbooks emphasize phonetics quite a bit. Since we didn’t use the same phonetic system that they teach, it was very confusing for my child. We tried it for a few days, and then gave it up.

I have never used Teacher’s manuals at the 1st grade level, so I can’t address that.

Generally, I would say that if your child has mastered phonetics to the point that they are reader for ‘readers’ you can just address issues and practice them as they come up in the reading. I keep a notebook with me during lessons and jot down the words or sound combinations that I notice my student has trouble with, and we review those. If it is repeated, I pull out the flash cards and use copywork with those words for a few days.

We really liked Explode the Code workbooks along side the pathway readers….but that’s just us!

And most CMer’s are pretty anti-workbook. For some of my kids who seemed to need extra help familiarizing themselves with writing words, the ETC workbooks were helpful. But some of my kids didn’t need them at all. They learned to read, did copywork, and read, read, read….

We have always used the Pathway readers, but have never used the workbooks. The kids read aloud to me or each other to work on elocution. We don’t use any workbooks in our homeschool; they just seem like busy work to me. Next year will be our first year to not use Pathway. Both my kids are reading so well and above level that we are graduating to chapter books with written narrations. They’ve both been reading chapter books for quite some time, but written narrations are new. Ds9 had success during our third term with this, and I look forward to working with dd8 beginning next year. For your situation, I would just let them read aloud to you and them orally narrate what they read. If sounding out words is still a problem, I recommend Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. Other than that,

Practice, practice, practice!