Reading Made Easy OR Delightful Reading

I haven’t used Reading Made Easy, but we have been using Delightful Reading. Overall, I like it. I have found the combination approach of teaching sight words in the context of a story and then using those as a jumping off point for phonics rules highly effective – we were sort of doing this anyway before the kit became available and having the kit made it much, much easier to put things together.

The one thing that bothers me a little bit about it is that the “word families” are strictly word families rather than teaching the sounds of the phonograms all kinds in different words. What I mean by that is that for example this week we studied the word family that included “raid, paid, braid” – and that was it. What we were doing before the kit was learning the ‘ai = long a” sound in words with various ending letters – so we would have done raid, paid, braid and then maybe switched out that last letter to make brain, pain, rain…and so on. Extending the application of that ‘rule’ so to speak. I guess I would just like a little stronger phonics emphasis than what DR gives. That’s just me though. =) Overall I think it is still a good program, dd LOVES it, and it is very well laid out and easy to use. If you want something that teaches phonics more systematically, however, then it may not be the best choice for you.

Jen